


Surfacing

by hlwim



Category: Fullmetal Alchemist, Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood & Manga
Genre: Alternate Universe, Angst, Drama, F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-11-06
Updated: 2014-08-20
Packaged: 2017-12-31 16:02:12
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 9
Words: 22,898
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1033604
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hlwim/pseuds/hlwim
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Fifth Laboratory took everything from her. [Royai, Riza/Havoc, Havoc/Rebecca; FMA:B AU]</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. One

**Author's Note:**

> Title: Surfacing  
> Summary: The Fifth Laboratory took everything from her. [Royai, Riza/Havoc, Havoc/Rebecca; FMA:B AU]  
> Pairings: Roy/Riza; Riza/Havoc; Havoc/Rebecca  
> Warning: major character death, allusions to suicide  
> Notes: This fic turns sharply AU a little before Episode 8 of Brotherhood, “The Fifth Laboratory”.

**One**

They never found his body.

Riza thinks that every time she drives past the laboratory—a crater which is quickly filled with its own debris and flattened. They never found his body, or the Fuhrer's, or any of the strange people Edward described—never found so much as bone powder sifting through the rebar and broken concrete.

Six feet beneath his tombstone lies a casket filled only with keepsakes: a pair of gloves, a chess king piece, a fishing lure, a porcelain figurine of a dog, Havoc's favorite lighter. Copies of medals he never liked to wear, and his dress uniform, and a pair of empty boots. Hughes put in a picture—their academy days, the two of them laughing with a third man Hughes refuses to name. Edward added nothing. He stood behind Riza during the service, flexing his repaired fingers, breathing hard like he was trying not to cry.

Then the gun salute: three repetitions of seven, and she was just supposed to walk away and carry on living as though nothing had changed—as though she wasn't already counting down the long, rudderless stretch of days approaching.

_They never found his body_ , Riza thinks, and she pulls over this time. It's been six months, and there's a fence up now. She wants to climb it and walk the emptiness, but a pair of MPs are watching, taking a few steps in her direction. So she works her fingers through the links instead—they'll be able to see the insignia on her shoulders from this distance and will probably keep back. After all, she's not hurting anything. Just looking.

“You're going to be late, Lieutenant.”

“Yes, Colonel.”

Hughes draws level—she didn't hear another car stop, so he must be out on his daily walk.

“This is a little far outside your usual circuit, sir,” she says.

“Not out of _yours_ ,” he says quietly. “Tomorrow's six months to the day. It's hard to believe.”

“No, it isn't,” Riza sighs. “Every day I wake up, and he's not there. That's fact. No belief required.”

Hughes bumps her shoulder with his, gently, dislodging her latched fingers.

“You came out here without a coat on?”

“I forgot it in the car.”

“Well, then, let's go get it.”

They've got the same meeting, and she lets Hughes drive. The car was Roy's, once, and she can never quite seem to reach the pedals.

Six months—her apartment smells like coffee now, instead of the previous tenant's smoke. Hayate doesn't cower in his bed whenever the front door opens. She knows the grocer's first name and that the streetcar always arrives three minutes early. She has her own desk, and an enlisted man who she can send out to buy dinner when she has to work late.

This is life now. This is existing.

She gets out of the car a moment after Hughes, and follows him at a half-pace behind, nodding at the salutes she notices on the periphery of her tunneled vision. Hughes has a seat at the table—Riza joins the aides lining the benches set against each wall. The senior staff stagger in, tired from lunch, and grumble their way around the arrangements. The last reedy old man has just settled into his chair when the shout goes up.

“Atten- _tion_!”

The room rises as one, a little unevenly, as the Fuhrer enters.

“Yes, yes,” he sniffs. “Please, everyone, let's get started.”

Riza's presence here is perfunctory—unnecessary really, as Hughes prefers to take his own notes, and anyway the Office of Investigation and Courts Martial was included only out of political politeness. So Riza doodles on her notepad, discreetly, once the officers are seated and the droning talk has begun.

Fuhrer Gardner isn't terrible, for only three months on top. His greatest accomplishment so far appears to be the successful continuation of every single one of Bradley's policies without deviation—the old status quo is the new status quo is the future. Small gains made against small losses, and the same wheels set in motion ten, twenty, ninety years ago are quietly greased and given the occasional helpful push.

Riza is drawing transmutation circles again, without thinking, and quickly defaces each with nonsense words and broken lines.

Hughes glances back at her with a bored smile. He's done well since the promotion. When he forces her to come over for dinner, Gracia beams with pride and Elicia chatters with excitement about the new house.

She still doesn't really understand that Roy's gone. She searches Riza's pockets now, but Riza always forgets.

“Where's the candy man?” she'll ask. “When is Uncle Roy coming over?”

The meeting breaks abruptly—everyone rising and shuffling as Riza's head snaps up. She slides the mess of drawings to the bottom of her folder, standing quickly. The Fuhrer holds conference with Raven and Clemin at the door, and Hughes is approaching her, head shaking.

“Exercise in pointlessness,” he sighs. “C'mon, Lieutenant. Gracia's making quiche. Let's get home before someone grabs us.”

“Sir,” she says, the habitual replacement for _yes_ when she really wants to say _no_.

Hughes doesn't like to go home in uniform, so now she keeps civilian clothes in a duffel beneath her desk. Simple, in everything: skirt, shirt, sweater, socks and boots. She takes a moment at the mirror in the bathroom, marking the progress of fatigue across her features. In another year, she will be twenty-seven.

She lets Hughes drive again, handing over the keys and walking at his shoulder. The halls are full—the lot less so. They get in together, and the engine rumbles awake, and Hughes turns to her.

“Look, Riza—”

“I hate you so much, sometimes,” she says quietly.

“I know.”

With a sigh, he signals a turn, joining the queue for the north gate.

“You told me it would get better. It would stop hurting—I'd figure out a way to move on.”

“I lied,” he admits, shrugging. “But it was a lie in service of a greater good. He would want you to live. To keep moving forward.”

“Who _cares_ what he wants—he's dead,” Riza says, vicious and sharp. “And don't tell me it would be any different if I had died and he had lived.”

“Are you kidding? He would've put a gun in his mouth the first night without you.”

“I _hate_ this,” Riza says. “I hate the pity, and the looks, and that all I have left of him are the scars—”

She looks away, hand over her mouth, furious at the slip. She can feel Hughes watching her as they roll out onto the road, but he says nothing. Maybe Roy told him. Maybe he's always known.

Through the rest of the ride, they don't talk. Hughes parks in front of his building and gets out—she waits until he opens her door, using the brief solitude to wipe her eyes and rub some color back into her cheeks.

They can hear voices from the bottom step.

“Visitors?” Riza asks.

“None I was expecting.”

All of the lights in Hughes's apartment are blazing—a sharp contrast from the darkness of the street and car and hallway.

“Daddy's home!” Hughes calls out. “And I brought Auntie Riza!”

Elicia comes tearing through the door to the dining room, followed close by Gracia.

“Maes, you'll never guess,” she says, breathless from his hello kiss, “who dropped by!”

She greets Riza with a hug—and they don't have to guess, because the clanking is an obvious clue.

“Hi, Lieutenant!” Alphonse says. “Hi, Colonel!”

“It's been a while, Al,” Hughes replies, holding out his hand. “Glad to see you're still in one piece.”

“That would be thanks to _me_.”

Jean Havoc appears, back-lit by the dining room's glow, grin wide. His mouth looks empty without the cigarette, but Riza can see one tucked behind his ear.

“Hey, Hawkeye,” he says, and he still smells like an ashtray, but his arms are warm around her back. Over his shoulder, as they step apart, she can see Edward shrinking into the corner.

“Hi, Edward,” Riza says softly. “You look a little taller.”

“Lieutenant,” he replies, meeting her eyes briefly before looking down again.

Dinner is less excruciating than she had expected—everyone wants to hear about Briggs, and Alphonse has plenty to share. Jean and Hughes handle the conversation's lulls, keeping them all clear of the obvious subject—Riza is grateful and stops after her second glass of wine.

After dinner is dessert, of course, with coffee to sober the adults. Elicia sits in Edward's lap, exploring his automail fingers. Riza shares the couch with Jean but turns a little away from him, focused on the bookshelves.

“It'll all be in boxes soon enough,” Gracia sighs. “I'm not looking forward to the packing.”

“When is the big move, anyway?” Jean asks.

“Next month,” Hughes says. “Why, you gonna be around to help?”

“Not a chance,” Jean laughs. “Armstrong gave me a week's leave. Then it's straight back up to the frozen north.”

“Sorry I couldn't get you any better,” Hughes half-sighs. “But when the major-general wants something...”

“Hey, I'm not complaining,” Jean says, hands up. “Technically, it's a hostile zone, so pay's double. And career track means I've always got something interesting to do.”

Jean offers to take her home, and Riza accepts. It's quickly established that the Elrics have a hotel room waiting, and they'd rather walk. Alphonse accepts her hug, but Edward still won't meet her eyes.

“Take the day tomorrow, Lieutenant,” Hughes says quietly, as he helps Riza into her coat. “I insist.”

“Sir,” she replies.

Jean drives.

“Midnight,” he says when they pass the clock-tower. “Fuck, it's been six months.”

“Why do we always measure it?” Riza asks. “One month. Four. Six. In another six months, it'll be a year. Then five, then ten. Then it'll be his fiftieth birthday, and he'll still be dead. Everyone knows that it happened. Why do we always have to say it? _It's been six months_.”

“We say it,” Jean chuckles, glancing over and righting the car gently when they swerve, “because it gives us _something_ to say. Fuck, Hawkeye, not everybody does silence the way _you_ do.”

Sex with Jean is simple— _perfunctory_ , really, and easy for her to attend as an afterthought. He has no complaints and no expectations, knows not to touch her back and doesn't mind that she prefers the top. Kissing him is like kissing an ashtray, of course, but she likes that—every single difference so sharp and defined.

His hands on her breasts are small and light, the pressure of his lips less firm—she doesn't have all that much to compare, but he feels different inside her, less desperate for constant contact, rough in the movement of his hips, adapting easily to when she wants him slow and when she needs him fast.

He doesn't seem to mind that she mostly keeps her eyes closed and that sometimes she whispers the wrong name—he keeps quiet, and when they're finished, she lets him smoke in bed.

“No luck with ladies in the north?” Riza asks through the half-closed bathroom door.

“Nah,” Jean sighs. “Everybody's either a Briggs man or so bundled up they look like roving fur huts. Besides, I know the one I'll end with.”

She manages half a chuckle before catching sight of herself in the mirror. Hair mussed and face flushed—but not smiling, not happy. Not even relieved, for a single moment, of the anchor chain noosed around her neck. Her eyes are set deep in their sockets, black around the edges and glinting empty beneath the buzzing vanity light.

She can hear Jean sliding off the bed, and he appears in the mirror behind her.

“Hey,” he says quietly. Her eyes snap shut as his arms twine around her, his chin resting in the hollow of her left shoulder. “C'mon, Hawkeye. Don't go under again. Stay here.”

He's warm against her back—the smoke lingering on his breath keeps her rooted in this room, in _this_ moment. She leans back, taking a few deep breaths.

“She mentions you plenty,” Riza manages, voice brittle. “You know, she'd retire in a heartbeat and follow you up, if you asked.”

“Nah,” Jean says again, and the stubble on his chin scratches her as he shakes his head. “She's not ready for that yet. Neither am I. Besides, I'm not bringing up a family in a place like Briggs.”

“Nice to have something to look forward to,” Riza chokes. “I wouldn't know.”

Jean presses a soft kiss to the side of her neck.

“Stop,” he whispers against her skin. “Let's get some sleep.”

He sleeps so heavily—another difference she marks. Riza lies quietly supine, tracking the line of moonlight across her ceiling. When Jean gets up, she feigns sleep and doesn't flinch at his hand threading through her hair.

She listens to him shower and dress and make breakfast—smells like sausage and toast. Then Hayate whines, and Jean chuckles.

“C'mon, mutt,” he says. There's the click of Hayate's leash, and then the snap of the front door closing. Riza slides from beneath the blankets and sets both bare feet flat on the floor.

She drags herself through the shower and getting dressed, ending up at the table just when Jean gets back, Hayate in one hand and a bouquet of severe white roses in the other.

“Too cold for his paws,” Jean announces, setting Hayate down, and they both shake off the cold. “Wind's gonna be shit today.”

“What are those for?” Riza asks, eyeing the flowers, slicing her toast into neat triangles.

“You know exactly,” he says with a sharp look. “You're not hiding from it.”

Still, he's respectful of her schedule. There's laundry and sweeping the kitchen, then making the bed and dusting the living room. Then folding and pressing her uniform for tomorrow, and letters to organize and scattered papers to collect. Jean sits on her couch with a book, quietly smoking, Hayate's head on his knee.

“You're not on escort?” Riza asks, correcting a crooked picture frame.

“Just the train trip down,” Jean says. “Back up, if the boys want. But they're down here for something special. Speaking of, we should get going.”

Hayate watches them get ready from the rug beneath the kitchen sink, head tilted, tail wagging off-beat. Jean pats his head, twice, and then hands Riza the bouquet.

They follow the setting sun to the cemetery, just outside the city limits. It's empty—like she hoped, and Jean parks at the gate. He leans against the hood to finish his cigarette, giving her time, as always. Riza stares straight ahead, fingers curled over the door handle, pain constricting her chest. Jean doesn't push her—he waits, and when she finally steps out of the car, he puts an arm around her shoulders and matches her pace.

The assigned plot is towards the back—set apart on the crest of a relatively empty hill. Today she can see it easily, festooned with a mess of poppies and nasturtium, probably from Armstrong and the panoply of younger officers they'd met the first weeks at Central. Closer, and she can see the white carnations from Hughes, left probably near dawn so he could walk to work alone. Then she is suddenly standing at the foot of the plaque, staring down a single stalk of asphodel amid a clump of harebells—the Elrics. There was almost no snow this year, and the frozen blossoms stand bright against the dead grass and frosted stone.

“Well,” Jean says needlessly. “Here we are.”

The tissue paper protecting the rose stems crinkles in Riza's fist.

“Promoted two whole ranks, just for dying in the line of duty. Ambitious son-of-a-bitch. But you always were.”

“I think,” Riza says faintly, “I think I want to do this alone.”

“Okay.”

Jean squeezes her shoulders and quickly lets go.

“I'll be at the car. When you're ready.”

She listens to the soft retreat of his footsteps down the hill, the crackle of leftover fallen leaves and distant whispering of tired winter birds. Her cheeks are stinging cold, and she kneels to lay the roses across the plaque, obscuring the first line. _For services rendered to the state above and beyond the scope of duty—_

Deep breaths: in and out, and in and out. She presses a fingertip against the stone and traces the numbers until her knuckles blanch from the pressure. Four digits each, simple and stark, sharp serifs and smooth bevel, _1885 – 1914_.

She sobs, and there is a flicker of movement at the edge of her vision—the trees at the bottom of the hill, the forest that will one day be cut down to make room for more dead soldiers. She scans the shadows gathered beneath the bare branches, but the sun is angled low, softening the edges of the world. It was probably the wind, or the sweep of errant wings.

Riza turns back, slow, unsteady, and the pain in her chest has drifted up, tightening her throat.

“Hello, Roy,” she whispers, broken open and hollow. “It's been six months.”


	2. Two

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **Trigger warning:** anxiety, panic attack

**Two**

There has to be a study about this somewhere, Riza thinks, as she sits across from Rebecca and stirs four sugar cubes into her tea: an examination of the psycho-sexual attitudes and behaviors of Ishvalan veterans, with particular focus on the structure of intimate relationships among old friends. A team of researchers commissioned by Central Command with clipboards and thick pencils—she can just imagine them perched behind the decorative hedge cutting the cafe patio into quarters, frantically scribbling observations, recording each gesture and inflection. Charts and maps, statistical analysis, hushed summation presented in black and white before a crowd of fellows, nodding sedately. At the least, she's fairly certain their diagnosis would be more technical than hers—more precise, perhaps, than just plain _weird_.

Rebecca is neck-deep in some rant about Grumman, and Riza knows that beneath the table, Jean's hand is resting on her knee while he listens, rapt, blowing smoke from the corner of his mouth. He graciously offered to sit downwind when they offered to sit outside. His week's leave is almost up.

“Anyway,” Rebecca finishes with a sigh. “He keeps asking about you.”

“He's always asking,” Riza says, shaking her head. “I've been told that's what grandfathers do.”

Rebecca narrows her eyes.

“Wouldn't kill you to take a week. He's an old man, after all.”

“And you know Hughes would probably approve it,” Jean adds. “What with the move coming. I'm sure he's distracted.”

“Aren't the Elrics headed east?” Rebecca asks. “I thought their names came across my desk.”

Riza sets her cup down and leans back, arms crossed, staring down their deceptively pleasant smiles.

“This is starting to feel like a conspiracy.”

“Nothing of the sort,” Jean grins. “Ed's got Briggs automail, but he only trusts that friend in Resembool. They were talking about heading out that direction in a couple of days.”

She narrows her focus, and he ducks, out of old habit.

“The form's already on his desk, isn't it?”

“Just a week's leave,” Jean says, grin widening with victory. “Get out of the city, get some fresh country air—nice long train trip with a pair of wandering alchemists? Sounds perfectly relaxing.”

“Fine,” Riza sighs. “But I'm doing this for _them_ , not me.”

The clock-tower chimes noon somewhere behind.

“Well, that's my job done,” Jean says, rising from the table and stubbing out his cigarette.

“Where are you off to?” Riza asks.

“Side project, for Major Armstrong.”

Without the slightest hesitation, he leans down and kisses both of them on the cheek.

“You on your way back tonight?” he asks Rebecca.

“ _Yes_ ,” she groans. “East will only pay for a day trip.”

“Sorry to see you go,” Jean says, “but glad I got to see you at all.”

“Stop being such a stranger. I've heard there's going to be joint maneuvers in the spring. I'm requesting _you_ special.”

“I'll watch for my invite.”

He waves once at the end of the block and then jams his hands into his coat pockets and saunters off, whistling.

“So how was he, last night?” Rebecca asks, and Riza makes a noise halfway between a laugh and a sigh.

“I really don't understand the two of you,” she says. “He didn't stay over.”

“He'll be back tonight,” Rebecca says sagely. “He'll want a tumble before he has to go.”

“Rebecca!”

“What?”

She takes a sip of her tea, brows innocently raised.

“We're both adults, Riza. We know what we want. Anyway, it's sort of like having you try on a dress at a store I can't get to. Lets me know what I'm buying.”

Then she smiles and touches the back of Riza's hand.

“Look, Riza, we've talked about this—Jean and I are...we're at an understanding. He lives his life, and I live mine, and maybe one day we'll be more, but I'm not tying him down to a promise. I don't love him the way you loved Roy.”

Riza doesn't flinch. She looks down at Rebecca's hand.

“Not yet,” Rebecca continues thoughtfully. “And maybe I never will. Hell, there are times I think, no one could love the way you and—”

Rebecca cuts herself off, pulling her hand back and pursing her lips.

“It doesn't bother me, what the two of you do alone. But if it bothers you, I'll stop asking. I only do it to tease—you know that.”

“I know,” Riza says quietly. “It doesn't really bother me. Being with Jean is just...comfortable. Simple.”

“Makes the hurt go away for a little while?” Rebecca suggests.

“Not really,” Riza says. “But I think I'm starting to accept that nothing will ever make it go away. That I just have to carry on like this and hope it doesn't get worse.”

She sighs and pitches forward, shoving her face into her hands.

“God, you're right. Maybe I need to get out of the city for a while.”

“I know it doesn't feel like moving forward, but you _are_ different,” Rebecca says gently. “And you've always got us to fall back on.”

“Yeah? What happens when you and Jean finally get your lives together?”

“Oh, that's a long way off. We'll think of it when it comes.”

It's annoying to be known so well. Together, they stand and pay and shake off the cold. Riza walks Rebecca to the station with fifteen minutes to spare—hasty goodbyes and Rebecca scrambling through the narrow car doors. Riza waves until Rebecca is a pinprick of brightness at the end of the track and then buys a ticket for a week hence.

“Weather should hold,” the ticket agent says. “Almanac warns of flooding, but when have those ever got a damn thing right?”

He smiles at her through buck teeth, and she smiles back. He could be anywhere between twenty-five and forty, with freckled skin and sandy brown hair. There's something in his broad shoulders that puts her in mind of home: steep valleys and mineshafts, coal-dust fingers and river-rock masonry. He lifts a hand to the brim of his short cap.

“Have a nice day, ma'am,” he smiles.

“Yes,” she says. “I'll try.”

There's a call to make, and she picks the third booth outside the station.

“Leave granted, Lieutenant,” Hughes booms. “Wouldn't you know—I think I filed the form yesterday!”

“So Sheska does signatures now?”

“Just go and relax, Riza,” he says, serious. “Take some time for yourself.”

“Yes, sir. And—”

She sighs, twisting her fingers around the handset.

“I know I don't say it enough, but—thank you. I know it wasn't easy for you to lose him, either. But you managed to keep going—keep us _both_ going. So thanks.”

He's quiet for a while before sighing in return.

“Don't thank me just yet,” he says. “I'll see you tomorrow, Lieutenant.”

“Yes, sir.”

The clock-tower is chiming four when she gets home, mouth and nose hidden in her collar, cheeks bitten red by the cold. Hayate bounces around her feet while she cleans, and Jean arrives, as predicted, just as the sun is setting.

She smells him first, sliding up behind, twining his arms around her waist while she's elbow-deep in soap and dirty dishes.

“Wait, just let me bask in the fantasy a moment,” he murmurs, lips beneath her ear. “Come home from long day at work, and there's a beautiful woman with dinner warm and waiting, faithful dog at the door, house sparkling clean.”

“Let me know when you touch back down,” Riza smirks, rolling her shoulders to dislodge him. “No dinner, so _you_ can starve.”

“Hey, what say we get some cheap, shitty takeaway from down the block and send the night in?”

“You're back up tomorrow?”

“Yeah,” Jean pouts. He wanders into the living room while she dries her hands, leaving the dishes for later.

“How was the job for Armstrong?”

“What?”

“The side project? The one that was so pressing, you gave up an afternoon with Rebecca?”

He still looks confused, head tilted to match Hayate. And then something connects, and he blinks.

“Oh,” he says. “Right. That—it was nothing.”

“Nothing?”

“Dumb stuff. You know how they don't talk to each other,” Jean says, nodding but with that odd look—almost unsure of himself. He smiles blankly, but it takes the space of only ten seconds for Riza to decide she doesn't care that much about the Armstrongs or their family problems.

They order food but don't quite get around to eating it: Jean pins Riza to the bed easily, who welcomes his weight. He pulls back once, a question in his eyes, but Riza shakes her head.

“Like this,” she says. “I'm sure.”

He kisses her slow and moves carefully, hands gentle on her thighs, lips light over her collarbone. She holds him close and marvels, as always, at how narrow his shoulders are, how thin and wiry the muscles working beneath his skin—unblemished by scars, smooth and flat, firm under her grip.

She closes her eyes and breaks the kiss, and he buries his face against the curve of her shoulder, and the familiar groans and gasps are suddenly at her ear.

“Riza,” he chokes.

Too close, constricting, the weight on top of her twice as heavy, burdened by rough desert fatigues, and she can feel the buckle of her holster digging into her back. She wants him rough, _wants_ it to hurt, because they don't deserve this, they have no right, when mere steps in either direction would lead them to a makeshift grave, and both of his hands are beneath her back, pulling her tight to his chest, and she can't quite shut out the sound of tears in his voice when he whispers her name.

“Stop,” she whispers. Breath is leaving her—crushed from her chest, can't force more than the smallest sound. “Stop. Jean, stop. Stop!”

“What? What's wrong?”

He's already pulling back, but she pushes him anyway, twisting out from beneath the tangled bedsheets, and there is a fine white haze around the edges of her vision. She's vaguely aware of hitting the floor, and she gets her hands beneath herself, shoving up, shaking, stumbling into the bathroom.

There's not much left in her stomach to empty, and she coughs between sobs, eyes streaming. She feels something warm drop across her shoulders and then hears the faucet running behind. Jean is suddenly there—laying a cool towel across her neck and gently sweeping her hair back with his free hand.

“Breathe, Hawkeye,” he says, rubbing warmth into her arms. “In and out. You're okay. I'm right here.”

He refreshes the towel a few times, until all she coughs up is bile and her arms feel ready to give out. Shaking and drained, she pulls the edges of the robe closed and collapses back against him. He reaches up to pull the flush chain and then offers a clean towel to wipe her mouth.

“I'm sorry,” he whispers, brushing her bangs back from her sweat-damp face. “I'm sorry.”

A few more coughs and a rattling sob or two—her heart still pounds in her ears, and everywhere Jean touches her bare skin is burning hot. Something inside is squeezing her heart, crushing, and her eyes snap closed.

“Slow breaths, Hawkeye. _Slow_.”

“C-could you...”

She swallows, wincing at the bitter taste and rough scrape of her voice.

“Jean, I know we didn't...but could you just—could you smoke?”

He doesn't question it—he gets up, propping her against the cold porcelain of the tub, and digs around in the bedroom for his cigarettes. As smoke fills the room, the tightness in her chest loosens, and Riza's sobs become gasps become steady, even breaths.

Jean re-enters the bathroom, half-dressed now, frown open with concern.

“Better?” he asks.

“Yeah, just—”

But she shakes her head. There's no way to explain this, even to herself.

After a few minutes, she feels safe to stand—Jean lurches forward when she wobbles, but she waves him back, using the wall to balance. She makes it to the bed, and Jean tucks the blanket close around her before climbing up. She can hear him shifting about behind her, switching off the lamp and fumbling with the ash tray.

“Don't,” she says. “Just let it burn.”

He starts off keeping his distance, but when she wakes up between two and three, Jean's arm is resting along her hip. Her tongue feels thick. Riza slips out from the cocoon of Jean's body heat and the blankets, padding into the bathroom for water.

Her face still looks a mess, but she can tell that sleep has helped some. She combs her hair with stiff fingers, flattening a few stubborn knots.

The air smells hard and stale, and back in the bedroom, she cracks the window. The breeze cuts right through her thin robe, but she welcomes the shiver and pushes the frame a little further, breathing deep, letting the cold fill her.

She can see the street-corner from here—the one with the light that never seems to work. Someone is standing beneath it, shoulders bowed, hands shoved into coat pockets. She can make out only impressions of the body, but she'd recognize the military shine of those boots anywhere.

“Hawkeye?” Jean mutters, slowly untwisting. “S'matter?”

“Just wanted some fresh air,” she replies.

“Oh. Wha'you doing?”

“Nothing, just—the MPs in this sector are so creepy.”

“What d'you mean?”

He yawns and uses the headboard to stand. Riza glances back to the street, pointing.

“They just stand there. Every night for the last month. Couple of hours at least.”

“What?”

Suddenly he is fully awake, crossing the room and putting himself between her and the window. He stares down, frown creasing his face, groping at the waistband of his trousers—where his gun would be, Riza thinks.

“I'll say something to the provost next time I see him,” she says, but there's tension in Jean's shoulders—too much for his soft laugh.

“Yeah,” he says, tapping the window closed again. “No light there—easy to take an extra break or two. C'mon. I'll open the window in the living room. Won't be as cold when we get up.”

With gentle pressure against her hip, Jean steers Riza back towards the bed, but she snatches one last glimpse outside. The figure at the corner is still there, but looking up now—the red glow of light pollution reflected in his eyes. She shivers again.

She settles back in bed while Jean tends to the window—she hears the creak of the frame, and then the rattle of the door knob. Jean comes back still frowning.

“Did I forget to lock it?” Riza asks.

“No, just checking.”

It's still fairly dark, but she can see him fussing over something near his bag—his gun, as she can hear him click the safety and carefully set it, unholstered, on the bedside table. A moment later, he's crawling back into bed, back around her, tucking the blanket up again. She wants to ask, but doesn't.

“C'mon,” he says. “I've got an early train.”

She sleeps—she has no idea if he does as well, because he's already showered and dressed when her alarm goes off.

He kisses her at the door—sweeping a critical eye over hall first, she notices.

“Stay out of trouble, Hawkeye,” he says. She pulls him back, gripping the sides of his jacket.

“You, too,” she says, frowning herself.

She kisses him again and then lets him go, shooing Hayate back inside.


	3. Three

**Three**

Riza had meant to stagger the timing of her arrival with the Elrics'—forgetting, of course, the boys' decidedly casual relationship with deadlines. She follows the blonde braid and red coat from a distance, chin slightly tucked, Hayate in lockstep. They've seen her in civilian clothes before, and she doesn't want to spook them.

Alphonse won't be a problem, of course, but Edward might run. His determination to avoid her has thus far only been matched by his determination not to be called short.

He _is_ taller, Riza thinks, frowning. Not by much—not enough that Jean wouldn't still use him as an armrest in teasing—but when his back is straight he seems almost to reach Alphonse's shoulders. Right now, he's walking hunched, hands shoved into his coat pockets and head down, dragging his satchel until Alphonse takes it from him. They pick a car near the end of the train and enter without looking back.

Riza marks the time on the clock suspended against the far station wall and then, with a click of her tongue at Hayate, turns into the small newsstand at the end of the platform. The old man behind the counter picks dispassionately at his own merchandise, grunting his way through the transaction when she sets down a bag of chocolates and a copy of the day's paper.

“Just these, thanks,” she says, needlessly, sliding her coins across the counter. The old man grunts again and takes his time counting out the change. Riza glances back at the clock—fifteen minutes, and her eyes wander along the gleaming green engine, the extinguished lamps, the scattered midweek-morning crowd, the arrivals piled exhausted between overstuffed bags and benches. Peeking behind a thick column just past the newsstand door, her eyes find the profile of square glasses and a spiky puff of dark hair.

“Kain?” she calls out, taking the change without checking. “Kain Fuery? Is that you?”

He looks around in panic a moment before seeing her, snapping quickly into a salute.

“Lieutenant Hawkeye! I didn't recognize you without the uniform!”

She returns the salute, and Hayate barks—Fuery laughs and kneels to pat his head.

“Hey, boy,” he says. “You sure got big since I saw you last.”

“It's been a while,” Riza agrees. “Has the south been treating you alright?”

“Good enough, I guess,” Fuery says, grinning at her. “I'm up for a little, running errands for Southern Command.”

“I'm off on a week's leave myself. You just missed Jean Havoc on the same.”

“Oh, well, I'm sure I'll see him—I mean, _you_ , around...”

Fuery blinks and looks away. Behind them, the conductor calls the all-aboard.

“That's me,” Riza says. “Send me a letter sometime, will you? I worry about you, down on the front all alone.”

He says something back, but a whistle blows and she feels the pull of the approaching departure. She shouts a goodbye and runs, and then waves from an open window—thinking, as Fuery fades smaller and smaller on the platform, that she should've told him to pay a visit to Falman.

Riza smiles down at Hayate, who _woofs_ up at her a little balefully. Even scattered as they are now, there's no reason they shouldn't all try to keep in contact. Riza shifts the bag on her shoulder, stowing the paper and chocolates, and then turns into the car.

It's been a while since her last trip, but the train seems crowded for a midweek morning—to her advantage, as she passes row after row of occupied benches with Hayate sniffing everything and politely ducking outstretched hands. There's no pattern she can tell of the passengers—large families seated with students, military cadets and girls fresh from the conventry, old men and their sharp-suited wives. She passes a couple obviously on their honeymoon: arms entwined, with softly satisfied smiles, their matching gazes miles away from anything around them.

A heaviness settles over Riza's shoulders when she reaches her target, the third-to-last car. Alphonse takes up an entire bench by himself, facing away from her and obscuring Edward, who she knows will be slumped against the window with that permanent frown. She approaches quietly, smiling, and Hayate doesn't give her away.

“Is this seat taken?”

It takes a moment for Edward to react—her words hit his shoulders first, and he snaps up, shoving himself against the car wall. He has the wild look of cornered prey: she smiles as gently as she can, standing back enough that he could manage an escape if he really wanted.

“Of course not,” Alphonse says for his mute brother. “Boy, this is a surprise! It's great to see you again, Lieutenant.”

She sits, leaving plenty of space for Edward to shrink away. Hayate sighs, turning a few circles before lying down beneath the bench.

“Alphonse, you know you can just call me Riza.”

“Sure I know, Lieutenant, and I promise I will. Once you start calling me _Al_.”

She's learned to read the smile behind his words—to strangers, the helmet gives only the impression of a stern severity, but sometimes Riza can just imagine the grinning little boy stuck beneath.

“But _Alphonse_ has such a nice ring to it.”

“Well, so does _Lieutenant_.”

Al gestures to Hayate and the bag tucked against Riza's leg.

“Are you on leave?”

“Yes, a week,” Riza says. “I owe my grandfather a visit.”

“Oh. Where does he live?”

“East City, of course,” Riza laughs, but Alphonse's head remains curiously tilted. “Haven't I ever told you? Lieutenant General Grumman—he's my grandfather. My mother's father.”

“You never said.”

Edward looks shocked at his own boldness and shrinks back against the window, glaring at his hands.

“I heard you boys are headed back home,” Riza says after a moment, keeping her tone low and level.

“Just for a couple days,” Alphonse supplies. “Brother's always forgetting his maintenance.”

“I don't forget,” Edward mutters. “I just don't have the time.”

Little by little, Riza and Alphonse work together to coax the slightest participation from Edward. He still won't relax or even meet Riza's eyes, but he laughs once and even smiles for a bit before realizing and fixing the frown back in place. When the lunch cart comes past, Riza buys two sandwiches with a half-glance of guilt at Alphonse. He says nothing, as always, but it still feels a little cruel.

“I'm not that hungry,” Edward says.

“Yes, you are,” she sighs, setting the sandwich on the bench between them. “You're always hungry.”

Frustration wells in her throat—followed fast by guilt, because Edward's behavior is nothing more than a mirror of herself. The wrapper crinkles in his hands, and he picks the bread apart, but he takes a bite and then another, and mumbles something like _thank you_.

“We're almost to East City,” Alphonse says, head turned to the window. “Home's not too long after that.”

He holds his hand out to Hayate, who shuffles out from beneath the bench and sniffs hopefully for some food.

“We haven't been home since the colonel's funeral.”

Edward jumps.

“Al—”

“That's funny,” Riza interrupts. “Neither have I.”

She smiles at Alphonse, as best she can, to show there's no offense.

“I'm glad you boys came down. I saw the flowers you left him—that was very sweet.”

“We really miss him.”

“Shut up, Al!” Edward snaps.

“S-sorry, brother.”

“Don't apologize,” Riza says. “That was rude.”

“I just—I don't want to talk about that,” Edward says through gritted teeth, automail hand fisted in the fabric of his coat. Riza sighs, sweeping a stray breadcrumb from her knee, steeling herself for the question.

“Can I ask you something?” she says. “Do you think that I blame you for Roy's death?”

Alphonse gasps, but she doesn't give them a chance to reply.

“Because I don't, Edward. I _don't_ blame you.”

She include Alphonse with a glance—he carries guilt differently, but he was there that night, watching the building collapse at her side and in her heart. Hayate reads the mood and puts his chin on Edward's knee with a soft whine—he's turned away from them completely, and she recognizes that sound. He's trying not to cry, and failing.

“Why?” he whispers thickly. “Why _wouldn't_ you?”

She wants to take his hand, to pull him into a hug—but she won't overstep. It's hard not to see the shadow of that broken little boy she first met, even when he's always acted so much older. He must be sixteen soon, and Alphonse fifteen shortly after that. No matter how she feels towards them, she can't deny—they haven't been children for a long time.

“Edward, there was _nothing_ you could have done.”

“That's not true.”

“I read every inch of that report, a hundred times—there was no way—”

“I could've gotten him out. I was _right there_ , and—”

“He was pinned.”

“I could've used alchemy—”

“He was twice your size. That building collapsed seconds after you got out. You would never have been able to drag him all that way yourself.”

His mouth closes, and Edward looks down again—surprised, maybe, that he'd managed eye contact for so long.

“He broke my arm.”

He spreads the fingers of his automail hand wide and then clenches them into a fist. His other hand stays flat.

“He wanted to get you out of there,” Riza says gently. “Roy knew what he was doing. He knew the building was coming down. He knew there wasn't time, and he knew you wouldn't listen. I would've done the same thing.”

“He was only there because of me—because I was too _stupid_ —”

She takes a chance—pushing her fingers between his, pressing her warm palm against his.

“It would be easier, wouldn't it? Because you blame yourself, and you want everyone else to blame you, too, because the looks and the pity and all the reassurance—sometimes it's so overwhelming you just want to scream, but you don't. You keep quiet, keep it all in, and hope it doesn't eat you alive.”

His hand is cold and damp, but she tightens her grip.

“You think I don't know how that feels?”

Alphonse is a decent shield from the rest of the car. Riza pulls a handkerchief from her pocket and holds it out to Edward. With a thin choking laugh, he wipes his eyes while Riza digs into her bag.

“Want some chocolate?” she says. “It'll make you feel better.”

She holds the bag open and tips a few pieces into his open hand.

“I'm sorry,” Edward replies between little bites, “for the way I've been acting towards you. I didn't know what to say to you, and I guess I was kinda scared of what you'd say to me. But, um—”

He sucks in a breath.

“—h-how _have_ you been? Y'know, since...”

Riza studies her own hands—nails bitten down and knuckles pockmarked with tiny cuts.

“Not so good,” she says. “But I tell myself every day that it's easier. I think I'm starting to believe me.”

They reach East City in comfortable silence—Edward has a hard time letting go of her hand, happy to be pulled into a hug.

“Come see me when you're in Central again,” Riza says into his shoulder. “It would do us all good to see each other more.”

“We will,” Alphonse says, accepting a hug as well. “Really soon, we promise.”

They leave her at the edge of the platform, with Hayate's leash in one hand and her bag in the other. She's folded into the great rush of people climbing on to and off of the train—pushed along towards the end. Just past the bright red caboose, she can see the railwaymen pulling huge metal switches, changing the track for the next arrival.

A knock startles her—she's pulled level with the third-to-last car, and Edward is unlatching the window and leaning out.

“Lieutenant!” he shouts over whistles and rumbling crowd. “Wait!”

“Did I forget something?” she asks, approaching, bringing Hayate to heel.

“Yes,” Edward says with an open, nervous expression. “And no. There's something I—something I need to do. I left something out of the report. Something I...that I lied about.”

He lifts his hand—a silver chain stretches between silver fingers and at the end of the chain is a pocket-watch.

“The last thing he said to me—he broke my arm, and he told me to leave, and then he put this in my hand, and he told me to give it to you. _Get out, and get this to her._ ”

The watch is just larger than the hollow of her palm—it lies perfectly flat beneath the curl of her fingers. He coils the chain up, not letting it drop, as though too fragile for the short distance from his hand to hers.

“I'm sorry I—I'm sorry I didn't,” he chokes. “That I held onto it this whole time, when it...when it should have been yours. I just...”

He sighs.

“I wasn't ready to let go.”

Another whistle blows, and the train jerks—breaking the connection. Now she's the one who can't make eye contact—gaze darting anywhere but Ed's face. For the second time today, someone is speaking, and Riza isn't listening. She takes a few steps with the train.

“What?” she says. “What did you say?”

But he shakes his head and pulls his arms back into the moving car. The train is picking up speed, pulling away from her. She follows only another half-step and then gives up, always too easily.

Grumman has sent a sergeant and a car to collect her—Riza hides her hand and the watch beneath her folded coat when he finds her. The watch is property of the state—treason to possess it, impossible now to think of letting it go.

“I'm supposed to take you to the house first and then Command, ma'am.”

She nods at his smile in the rear-view mirror, and then catches a flash of blue behind the car. When she turns, nothing stands out in the crowd—but she looks twice, just to be sure. The sergeant takes no notice, humming and drumming his fingers on the steering wheel. She waits to be sure he isn't interested in conversation before pulling the watch out again.

Morbidly, she expects to find blood caked in the seam and hinges, but each deep-carved crevice is clean and shining bright—not so much as a scratch across the smooth silver back. It's been cared for, obviously, in the months since it left him. She turns the watch over and over, as though seeking some long-gone residual heat from his hands.

She should have asked if Edward opened it. Holding the back to her ear, she listens for the tick of gears and springs—still working, still counting down the hours and minute and seconds. A simple press of the pin at the top will release the latch.

The sergeant is still humming—East City slides past outside the car, misted motionless with winter's cold. No one on the street looks up, faces bent into collars or tucked behind scarves. Hayate is asleep on the bench seat beside her, muzzle resting on his crossed paws. With an unsteady breath, she focuses her gaze and taps the pin.

Nothing. Only the clock-face, and a blank silver circle in which Riza can just make out her own muddled reflection.


	4. Four

**Four**

One week easily becomes two—there is apparently no one left in Central capable of denying the request of a lieutenant general. It's a struggle for Riza to remember to call him g _randfather_.

He’s excited at her presence but still busy, so she spends most of her time alone, giving a few hours to Rebecca and a few to reviewing Eastern Command. She is not high enough in rank to merit much attention, moving without remark from officer to officer. She thinks of going to the gun range once or twice—but it is only a thought. Passing, pointless. Nothing really has changed since her promotion to Central. The halls, maybe, are a little more empty.

She is expected at dinner each night when Grumman returns, and she attends without complaint.

“I don't like the idea of you living alone out there. I wish you'd come back.”

“I work for Colonel Hughes now.”

And Grumman sighs, and sets down his fork, and he stares at her across the dim table, while Riza works her jaw and swallows and stares back.

“I guess I never thought you'd make a career of it. Without him.”

“What else am I supposed to do?”

Being a soldier is reflex now, an instinct worked deep into the marrow of each bone. What else _is_ she supposed to do? She tries to recall the ambitions of childhood and comes up empty—there was her father, and the house, and Roy, and nothing of consequence between the three.

_Ambition_ was always abstract to her. Roy lived by it—an idealist, in the most impure sense, and she could never understand. Pragmatism had always carried her through the worst. There was existence before and survival after: a self subsumed beneath basic needs. Only what is necessary to get through the day—that, at least, remains unchanged, even if her motivation is lacking of late.

Riza has no desires. She drifts, seeking anchors, and when Grumman shakes his head at her silences, she closes her fingers around the watch and fixes an empty smile to her face.

Most of the time, the watch lives in a small pocket hidden in the lining of her coat. She feels its impact against her heart with every step, and every night she takes it out—to polish and to re-examine, drowning in the unspoken certainty that she has missed something perfectly, vitally simple.

_Get out. Get this to her._

She conjures scenarios and dreams of it, voyeur to his last moments—the official report was clinical in description, but her dreams easily fill the gaps with detail.

She begins with a shadowy impression of Roy, waking suddenly beneath a blanket of rebar and chunked stone, coughing blood and calling out for Edward. His protests were typed out, word for word, in the report: _no, hold still, Colonel, I'll get you out_. She can conjure the tremble in his voice, the cracks of pressure and fear, the skin scraping off his fingertips as he scrabbles through the drifting dust.

No description of injuries, so she supplies: fractured ribs and collapsed lung, a puncture wound or two. She had seen crush injuries in Ishval—mortars bringing buildings down on the heads of whole platoons, and the pure agony of waiting for a slow death, blood bubbling from the corners of their mouths. They were told not to waste the water, but at least it seemed to quiet the suffering.

So there was the taste of blood in the back of his throat—the report may not have mentioned, but it's a detail she revisits with each conjuration. Blood, and a cough, and the swift unmistakable realization of the coming end—and only seconds to make the final choice.

She cannot remember Roy's voice. Blurry, as though through a window long-dusted from disuse, she makes his lips form words and his eyes twitch in the mockery of expression, but it's all empty. Flat affect—he instructs through detachment.

_No, Fullmetal, listen to me, it's too late, get out while you can._

The point of impact, the twist of his arm over and around and then the sharp snap at an already-weakened hinge. In this, the report was unclear, and so she can only imagine every conceivable possibility. He would have been too weak for a flat hand, positioned wrong for the necessary force. A twist of rebar, a nearby brick. His sidearm, perhaps, through blunt force or ballistics. However the method, Edward stumbled out with only wires dangling below his elbow.

Lacking alchemy: useless. Rendered inert and empty and without hope. It was so easy to explain in sunlight, to give voice to assumed reasons, with Edward's hand curled into hers and his tears soaking into her handkerchief. Lying quietly still in this overlarge bed, in the darkness of her grandfather's house, it is less easy to explain, and she feels an ugly spike of hatred for Edward.

_Get out. Get this to her._

Sleep is not coming. Tonight, the fourteenth since her arrival, she has run down all possibilities, exhausted every painful aberration in a storyline of which she has always known the inevitable end. She is tired of this hermitage, tired of counting ceiling tiles. She slips on boots and buttons a shirt and checks the watch in the lining pocket of her coat. Hayate yawns at her passing from his box beside the oven, but he does not rise to join her.

The outside air nips at every scrap of exposed skin. She lets her hair fall over her ears and ducks her chin past the collar of the coat, hands curled into her gloves. Her sidearm rests, cold weight and reassuring, on her right hip, as she closes the garden gate with a snap.

Hatred is unfair—it's a mixture of envy and anger she feels, and Edward is assigned the ugliest parts for no greater sin than being where she wasn't. It's not his fault—she said it, and it's truth. The only people responsible are the ones who destroyed that building, the ones who were there and never identified and whose motives remain a frustrating mystery. The newspapers were told to print about anarchists, to keep fear contained. For the most part, it seems to have worked.

As she expected, the streets are less empty this late, but she remembers most of the best back-alleys to avoid traffic. She seeks comfort from the rhythm of her feet hitting the pavement, the steady hum of electric lights, the hitch of her breath on each inhale.

“Get out,” she whispers under her breath, syllables stuttered with each footstep. “Get this to her.”

Again and again, emphasis on a different word each time, to see how the meaning changes. An order, a last request—a mutter of regret? Emotion should always be kept out of the report: first-person plural, past-tense, adjectives only when deemed absolutely essential.

“Get _this_ to her. Get this to _her_.”

The commanding verb itself so odd—so general, generic, a placeholder really, for something more. Give, take, hand off, provide, pass on, deliver.

A party of drunks spill onto the pavement ahead, and Riza steps down into the street to avoid their laughter and reaching hands. She pulls at her own coat, readjusting, hands tightened to fists, exhaling in a fog of annoyance.

So now she has fallen to parsing grammar and syntax—Roy was never over-careful in word choice, and part of her understands that this is just latent desperation. There is no secret, hidden message in such meaningless final words—and she had no right to expect more. They could never rely on words. Loving a man for more than a decade assures no secrets left unknown—there were times, especially towards the end, that Riza was sure she knew Roy better than he had ever known himself.

She loved him, and he isn’t around to protest the assumption that he loved her back.

The streetlight above flickers, and Riza stops beneath. This intersection of streets is unknown to her—or, in the sweeping black veil between late night and early morning, it has become unfamiliar.

She knows better than to look lost on an empty street, and when she hears footsteps, she sets off, not overly-quick, in the opposite direction. Some of the larger public houses—the beer halls that double as hostels when their patrons are too drunk to find their way home—are still open, somewhere ahead or behind, and her eyes dart left and right, seeking the protective glow of neon. She wishes now that she had brought Hayate—that she had a scarf or thicker gloves or a crowd to melt into.

The footsteps are heavy: laborer’s boots or military, evenly paced with hers. The echo makes it difficult to guess, but she'd put the wearer back about fifty paces. When she turns a corner, they follow and speed up.

“Hawkeye, wait!”

A thrill of fear masks recognition—gun already in hand, and she is just clicking off the safety when he moves into visual range. She is struck dumb.

“Hey, hi, long story—we need to get out of here,” Jean Havoc says, breathless, shoving a black balaclava from his face. He extends a hand and grips her arm, as though to pull her back from the depths of the alley. Riza finds her voice.

“What—what are you—Jean, what the _hell_ are you doing here?”

He flashes something close to a smile—tight and pained, and his words are somehow more twitchy than his agitated posture—delivered fast and sharp.

“That is anincredibly long story, and I promise that I will tell you every inch of, but we _absolutely_ need to get the fuck out of here right now.”

“No,” she says, pulling free of his grip, dazed. She leaves the safety off. “Tell me now—what is going on? You went back north.”

“Yeah,” Jean sighs, “I didn’t. Sorry, again— _long story_.”

His gaze flits over everything but her face, scanning the darkness behind her. She can only see him for his face and the tuft of hair sticking up from the static—he is otherwise indistinguishable from the building shadows: tactical black from toes to fingertips. Even the usual cigarette is missing, and he chews his lower lip, breathing hard through his nose.

“What the hell,” Riza says, punctuating each word with a step away from him, “is going on? Were you _following_ me? How did you even get here?”

“By train, and yes, and I swear I'll explain— _please_ , Riza.”

With obvious reluctance, he steps closer, following her retreat into the alley, still searching. A cold dread slips down her neck.

“Jean, what are you looking for?”

Behind him, the streetlight is extinguished in a shower of sparks.

“Run!” he shouts, but it’s too late—something solid slams into Riza from behind, a massive weight knocking her flat and forcing the air from her lungs. Her sidearm skitters away across the pavement, and she hears the painful _whump_ of Jean hitting the ground a few feet away. Her vision explodes with dancing lights and the red haze of impact.

Claws dig into her shoulder, and foul, humid breath washes across her face. Powerful limbs—paws, hands, feet—clamp down on her body, holding her tight. The weight is incredible, crushing her chest, while Riza thrashes uselessly. Only her head can move, and she twists her neck sideways to see—feathers and fur, two sets of glowing red eyes, and a long grey tongue that lolls between savage-looking teeth.

She can hear Jean, coughing and struggling against his own captor.

“Riza, listen—”

But the snap of fingers silences him. The night sky goes suddenly cloudless, and there are footsteps approaching, a sharp staccato of heavy boots. A voice rings out.

“Now—what sort of welcome was _that_?”

Bile rises in her throat, and Riza swallows it—at this angle, she will drown. She watches the boots—black, polished to military shine, laced up to bloused blue trousers. The boots stop, and there is a sweep of fabric as the man kneels.

Two white gloves, and red stitching, and her eyes are flooding from the pressure, but still she can see: salamander and flame. She won't raise her eyes any farther and that voice—that _voice—_ speaks from only inches above her ear.

“Don't—” Jean says, but a second impact—flesh on flesh—crushes his protest. 

One hand—she feels the drag of ignition cloth against her skin—curls sinuously under her chin and tilts her neck, forcing her to look.

And he is smiling at her, one eye whole and glinting red, the other warped and glowing white—the way his hair falls over his face sparks sickening-sweet memory, and her body struggles and bucks beneath the weight, miles ahead of her blank mind.

“Hello, Lieutenant,” Roy whispers, lips twisted in a savage sneer. “Didn't you miss me?”


	5. Five

**Five**

It is Roy.

It is _Roy_ , and she is going to be sick because she knows it is also _not_ Roy, even as she stares into the shadows of his face and drowns in the familiar depths. His right eye is the same charcoal-grey, blue-tinged in the moonlight, but his left—milk-white, almost porcelain in its sheen, with a red-winged serpent circling where his iris should be. The lids are lash-less and marked by a crosshatch scar—the narrow slit between isn't widened by his sneer, and it gives his face an ugly lop-sided slant.

“I don't know what I expected,” he says, and the hand curled beneath her chin stretches her neck tight, sending tendrils of pain down her spine. His head tilts right and then left, examining. The fog of her escaping breath veils his stare. “Not much, of course—you're still _human_ , and we can't expect much from such weak stock.”

Her left arm is trapped beneath her chest, the creature's weight above compressing her wrist into her sternum. Her legs are stretched and ankles twisted out, and there is nothing beneath her feet against which she might gain leverage to break free. Her right hand—fingers spread flat against the pavement—is a whisper away from the sole of his boot.

This is not Roy. This is _not_ Roy.

His thumb rests against her bottom lip, and she stares into his slitted white eye until hers blur and burn. The _smell_ of him—sulfur twisting up inside her, and she breathes through her mouth, raggedly. The pin of her hair-clip digs its point into her scalp.

“I'm underwhelmed,” he says, releasing her so sharply that her chin slams into the pavement and she tastes blood.

“Leave her alone!”

“We'll get to _you_ in a minute, Lieutenant Havoc,” Roy snarls, and at his nod, the creature— _chimera_ , she realizes—slams a massive fist between his shoulder-blades. “Patience is a virtue, isn't it?”

And he laughs, cold and sharp and short, as though it's a joke they should all share. He takes a few steps away, locking his hands behind his back.

“East City,” he sighs out. “I was a different man the last time I was here—I used to get out more, but...well. Life has this inconvenient tendency to carry on, even in our absence.”

Riza has never felt cold like this. Viscous and splintery-sharp at once, rattling in her mouth and slithering through her chest, smoke and all the accompanying ash stirred up from a long silence. The chimera above carries no heat in its skin—it is a mass of nothing, a weight made worse by the absence of all else. She coughs, sprinkling the iced pavement with a little more of her blood.

“You're not him,” she says, squeezing her eyes tight. “You're not Roy.”

“I _could_ be,” he replies. “You have no objective proof.”

“You're not.”

He's coming back—each step heavy and sure.

“I,” he says, and his voice is coldest of all, black and dead as his right eye, “ _could be_. Isn't that enough? I _could_ be Roy Mustang.”

She flinches, and he wrenches her chin up again—a spike of pain straight down her spine.

“Look at me.”

She shakes her head, and somewhere behind and off to their right, Jean is coughing breath back into his lungs.

“ _Look at me_!”

The force is worse than the impact—more blood and the black flattening of the world—and again she must stop herself from being sick. White waves tendril along the periphery of her vision. He lets go, and she opens her eyes.

“I could be. This is _his_ face. _His_ voice. It hasn't been long enough for you to forget that, has it?”

Her right hand—and his left boot, and the whisper of space between. He raises the heel of his boot and brings it down on her thumb.

“You know, I'll never understand this part,” he sighs. “The wailing. The _nostalgia_. It's a city—a street—a _woman_. Why all the _carrying on_ about it? Why can't you just _let go_?”

Her next finger and next, down the line until her whole hand burns—below from the ice, above from the bite of the tread, between from each slow snap. She bites her lips bloody, muffling any sound trying to escape.

“She's nothing,” Roy near-shouts, addressing something far beyond them. “ _Nothing_. No great beauty, no wealth of talent beyond the kill, no great strength in character, but for _this_ —”

“Stop,” Jean gasps out.

Roy laughs, and the moon is drawing shadows across his face, painting a ghoulish tread.

“For this,” he says, somewhere between a snarl and a hiss, “I am given no rest?”

He rocks back onto his heel before crouching—his weight shifted again along the full length of her crushed hand. She feels the grind and crack of each break, and a scream escapes her.

“Says all he wanted was to see you safe, and I indulged him. Why not? Too tired to be much of a pest before—it's been hard work for him not to fall apart. But I'm tired now—tired of _sharing_. It's time for Roy to go.”

He is talking from above and below at the same time—she gasps and sobs, and the ice is crawling into her throat.

“He thinks everything's alright with the world if you're alive in it. He doesn't know any better. He _likes_ to watch—really, it's all he has.”

He leans down, and his smile is soft, open, bright. He caresses her cheek—ignition cloth working with the cold to scrape her skin raw.

“And now,” he whispers, brushing a stray lock of hair away from her eyes, “I'm going to make him watch you die.”

With a final grinding twist, he stands and steps away from her—and now she knows, through the starburst of pain clouding her thought, that the sparkling bright blurriness is oxygen—far too much of it, building up around her eyes and nose and mouth. Her throat burns on exhale and inhale—what she tries to force out comes rushing back in faster and faster.

The world shrinks down to Roy, his half-leer and tilted glance. He stands with arm outstretched, thumb and middle finger poised for the snap.

“Goodbye, Lieut—”

He chokes on it. His body jerks, bent double, then snaps up again.

“Not _now_ , Mustang,” he snarls, and his face contorts grotesquely with the effort, hands seizing his own collar. “I'm _busy_.”

The gathered oxygen has dissipated in the pause—Riza forces herself to breathe a little slower, closing her eyes briefly to concentrate on it.

“No,” Roy says, and his voice is suddenly rough. “No, I won't let you!”

The chimera on her back tenses, growling low. It's not enough to push loose, but Riza draws her wounded hand in, scraping across the pavement. Jean is still struggling, uselessly digging at the powerful arm wrapped around his throat.

“Go _away_! You won't win! I'm a thousand times stronger than—”

Roy screams. His neck is bent back, and his arm snaps out in convulsion. The spark of transmutation ghosts across his fingertips.

“You wouldn't _dare_ ,” he snarls, and fire erupts from his fingertips.

She cannot burrow away from the flames—can only suck in a final breath and wait. Heat claws the back of her neck, dancing down her shoulder-blades and along her spine, a storm of fire whipping across her body, tearing a few stray strands from her scalp. No scream, no escaping protest as red and orange and gold collapse beyond her closed eyes.

Darkness. She gags on ash and, sure of the absence, rolls clear of the chimera's charred skeleton. Jean is breathing as well—wracking coughs erupt from his half-closed throat, forehead against the pavement, fists clenching in weak rhythm.

“Hawkeye,” Jean chokes, taking a few tries to produce volume. He scrambles limply across the pavement and pulls her up by her shaking shoulders. His face is dusted with soot, dark as his mussed clothes. Riza can feel cold seeping through the tatters of her own coat.

“My hand,” she says weakly, cradling the ruined digits against her chest. “It's—”

They react at the same time—eyes snapping up to noise and movement. Twenty feet away, Roy slumps to his knees with a strangled cry, face hidden by his clawed hands. Jean shifts, half-shielding Riza as he inches towards her discarded gun.

“It won't help,” Roy rasps. But he makes no move towards them, arms braced around his middle, as Jean's hand curls over the grip.

“Always worth an attempt at least,” Jean spits, gun steady. Roy stares at them sideways, focus drifting in and out.

Riza is not listening—her eyes have fallen on the hands clenched over his sides, on the beads of sweat that gather at his temples, on the tremble flitting across his lips. A latent effect of the overexposure—the edges of her vision glimmer with haze, haloing him in the impression of movement. Of life.

Outside the Fifth Laboratory—the last time she saw him, and it's the same expression he wears now: the cool fear of resignation. They had left the Elrics in the care of Armstrong and his subordinates—other business brought them to Central in the first place, but it was established habit to keep tabs on the boys. And of course they slipped the watch—of _course_ they snuck out in the dead of night to explore the abandoned lab alone. Armstrong discovered the absence and reported it, and they had reached the barred doors only minutes after Edward disappeared inside.

She doesn't remember how or why the Fuhrer arrived—in her memory, there was only Roy, his worried frown, his fingers fumbling with the ignition gloves. He trusted her to help Alphonse, sharing a grimace. _Wait for me_ , he had said.

Nothing else. _Wait for me_ , with the understanding that he would come back again. Like he always had.

The ghost of a whisper. _Get out. Get this to her._

“Roy?” Riza whispers, sick with hope.

“Don't—don't come any closer!”

Jean's grip on her shoulder tightens, and he tugs back on her reach. Her unbroken fingers fan out and fall, curling up limply at the cry. Instinct. He orders—she follows.

“ _Please_ ,” Roy whispers. “Stay back.”

Jean is trying to angle her away from Roy, and she can see bright red splotches rising on the exposed skin of his neck. Bruises, soon enough, broken vessels drifting just below the surface.

“I don't—I don't know how long I can hold him,” Roy says. A muscle in his jaw twitches, and he bares his teeth, nearly a growl. “I haven't been able to break through before.”

He is a spring coiled to snap: the tension in every muscle holds him together but he has no control—convulsions ripple through each limb. Every reaction has a counter-reaction from somewhere deep within. He breathes in fits of gasps and coughs.

Pale. Hair disheveled but trimmed. The buttons on his jacket shine with polish, and the epaulettes of his rank lie neatly flat. Four gold stripes and three stars—still a colonel, regardless of what his tombstone might argue. These can't be the clothes he died— _disappeared—_ in, clear of tears or the tiniest fleck of debris. His boots are marred with flecks of blood at their soles.

He keeps his head turned left and ducked down, hiding that awful white eye.

“What the fuck are you?” Jean asks in a jagged tone. Roy gives a single bitter laugh.

“Homunculus.”

“Which one?”

Roy shudders.

“You need to leave,” he says. “You need to go—I'm fighting, but it's not enough. He'll take control again, and I can't stop him. Please run. _Please_.”

“Run from what?” Riza asks. “Roy, please don't—”

“ _Listen_ to me,” he snaps, and he won't look at her—won't meet her eyes or her reaching hand. Jean holds her firmly. “They're all involved. _All_ of them, right up to Bradley. They're trying to get to Armstrong. They don't suspect resistance—not yet, but they will now. Father is—”

His chin snaps up, and he gives a broken shout of frustration.

“He's alone,” Roy forces out. “He came here alone. Get out of the city—he'll run back to Central and report to Father. I'll slow him down as best I can.”

One arm snakes out from his middle, elbow angled sharply, clenched fist resting beside his face. His breaths come faster and faster.

“I'm sorry,” he whispers, thumb set against middle finger. “I'm sorry, Riza. _Run_.”

A spark of transmutation, and the ice around him is evaporating—a space of two meters on either side, sending up wispy tendrils of distorted air. Jean seizes her beneath both arms and drags her back, gun tucked into his holster, and Riza is slowly aware of a distant scream—her own, in the sharp silence just before ignition.

The explosion throws them back out to the street.


	6. Six

**Six**

“How many times did we drill it?” Breda demands, pounding the steering wheel. “How many fucking times— _don't leave your post, Havoc_.”

“Alright, _gently_. No need to aggravate the tendons.”

“I know—I _know_. But if I hadn't gone—Breda, you should've seen this thing. It would've destroyed her in seconds.”

“Sorry the light is such crap, Doc.”

“Don't leave your goddamn post! How many times? You're lucky Rebecca got the truck together so quick. The hell would you have done, if we weren't waiting at that corner? Guarantee they saw that explosion in Central.”

“Just try to keep it steady, Lieutenant. Best you can.”

“Grumman will cover for us. Don't be paranoid. We knew this was a possibility going in.”

“Sorry, Riza, honey. Keep still, and Knox will fix you right up.”

“Yeah, it was a goddamn possibility! One to be avoided _at all costs_. And you blew the fucking contingency when you left your goddamn post!”

Riza hears it all but absorbs nothing. Her hand radiates pain, clawed around the damage.

Knox. _Knox_. Riza knows that name—it tastes like desert dust on her tongue, parched throat and sun-raw cheeks. The name generates a familiar heat as well—not the flicker centered in her palm or the storm she can still see in the after-images dancing behind her eyelids. No—this heat is veiled and somehow diffuse, encompassing as a blanket, inescapable but shot through with the sense that the surface was close enough. If she could only keep kicking.

Ishval. Less a thought than a somnolent whisper. The endless sunset of her life: heat rash and splinters beneath the calluses on each thumb, black-bitten nails, and the rasp of a spade in sand. Digging down and down, watching the slow recline of her canvas-wrapped rifle along the crumbled ruin of a wall. Stables, once, somewhere long ago—still straw in the loft, and they closed the half-door to conceal themselves. To hide their sins from God, she thinks, a little perversely.

Boys leering at her—peeking between flaps of canvas on trucks too broken to be anything but tents. Women were thin in the ground at the front—the first thing Riza noticed, after the heat and the dry and the stench. The first night she spent with her bayonet up her sleeve and her sidearm beneath the pillow. The second night she spent in a tower, high above and far away, watching the silent world through a scope.

But that—the tower, the boys, the heat, the desert dust—that is not Knox. Knox is a man: squinting through half-fogged glasses, pressing a thick finger into Riza's swollen purple skin, his hand easily encircling her wrist. Stubble tracks from one side of his jaw to the other, and there is more grey in his hair, more lines spidering from the corners of his eyes, than she would expect for a man of his age.

Riza blinks. Knox, and not Ishval. A truck, and Rebecca Catalina bent forward, lantern held high, chewing her lower lip. In the front seat, Jean is arguing with Second—no, _First_ Lieutenant Heymans Breda. Jean has a cloth pressed to his neck, concealing the bruises that must be rising on his skin.

A smudge of antiseptic in the back of her throat: the field hospital. _Doctor_ Knox, with captain's epaulettes, squinting over an open abdomen, an excised burn. It was only her second week in the country, second week away from the academy, a day into her first break from the line. They needed someone to carry the bodies—still called casualties, still seen as living, until a medic could etch the accusatory _X_ across their foreheads.

Not living. Not dead. Hovering somewhere between until the final assignment.

Her first casualty, and her first friend: a sergeant snatched her off the line and shoved the handles of a half-collapsed litter in her hands. A mortar shell destroyed the boy's face, and his hands twisted up in the fragments of his jacket. He was still breathing, and she had heard that noise before, the guttural rasping moan of every inhale, and she leaned forward, towards the ragged hole that might have been his mouth. The split end of identification—she wiped blood from the silver indents. His name—or part of it—was Roy, and she poured a little water into his mouth. It dribbled out the side. Living or dead—and no telling until the medic arrived which one, which one.

No. She twists her head, shaking loose the grip of memory. _Not_ Ishval, Knox, _not_ Roy—

Except. The echo: _which one_.

“Lieutenant Hawkeye. Tell me if you can feel this.”

Except it _was_ Roy. 

She looks up and meets Jean's gaze. The noise of the truck—the engine, the arguing voices, the crunch of gravel—fades down to a sharp point, a tunnel to amplify her whisper.

“Which one.”

Now there is silence. Rebecca is trying to lean into her line-of-sight, lantern light dancing with the sway of the rumbling truck. Breda watches cautiously through the mirror.

“He said _homunculus_ , and you said _which one_.”

Jean staring back, mouth half-open. He closes it, licks his lips, inhaling.

“Riza—”

“You knew.”

She can feel her own lips curling—disgust, revulsion, the tightness in her chest the precursor to a scream. She wonders, wildly, if she's even said anything aloud.

But she has said it—some of it—and she knows he can't deny. He looks away.

“Stop the truck.”

“Lieutenant, look,” Breda says, “we're taking you somewhere—”

But she's not interested in repeating herself. Riza pulls her broken hand from Knox's slackened grip and yanks the door latch down. Breda swerves to the shoulder, swearing, and the momentum tips Riza from the truck. She slams the door hard and then leans her forehead against the icy metal, trying to keep her feet.

A brief flurry of words inside the truck, and then Jean, cutting through them.

“She's pissed at me—let her stay pissed at me. Stay in the truck. I've got this.”

So she pushes off, cradling her broken hand, spinning around to the tail and marching out. East, south? It doesn't matter. She needs distance.

“Dammit, Hawkeye, come back!”

“Get away from me!”

He jogs a bit to catch up—longer legs, longer stride, but she's not stopping. His hand closes over her shoulder, and she wrenches away.

“You _knew_ , you son-of-a-bitch, and you let me believe—”

“If you give me just five minutes to explain—”

“Fuck your explanation!”

She shoves him, almost unbalancing herself, and Jean falls back, more from respect than her efforts. She can barely see him anyway—the weakness of tears blinds her and burns her chest. He reaches out again.

“You gonna walk all the way back to East City?” he demands. “C'mon, Hawkeye, don't be stupid.”

“Get your hands off of me! You knew it was him—outside my apartment? You knew _right away_ that it was him, and you said _nothing_. What the fuck is wrong with you—took me all the way out to the cemetery, bought flowers, put on this charade and the whole time, for what? How could you—how could you _do_ that?”

He stops fighting back, arms limp at his sides, waiting her out.

“How could you let me believe—when you _knew_ he wasn't gone? How could you just—?”

Her voice, brittle as ice, cracks and splinters beneath the weight.

“You knew what it did to me, and you still let me believe that he was—that I was alone, and he—”

She turns away from him, hand half-covering her face. Running in place for so long has only worn her down, and everything is rushing up from behind—no chance to dodge the impact. She opens her eyes and lowers her hand and stares down the empty road, too blurred to take any of it in at first.

Pinpricks of light separate from the main mass and spiral out in eddies and lines. They are less form than a lack of movement. Buildings and the roll of hill after hill stand squat against the sky, black on blue. She is looking for the end—the exact point, where the sky meets soil and swallows everything up.

East City—she lived there once, for years, and never thought of it as home. Central isn't home, and her father's house never was. Ishval, she thinks, but that's no one's home anymore.

Riza takes a steadying breath. The pain helps to keep her grounded.

“I wanted to tell you,” Jean says quietly. “I was ordered not to. We all were.”

“I saw Fuery at the station when I was leaving. Falman's in it as well?”

“Yes.”

“And the Elrics?”

“They know, too.”

Something like a laugh leaves her—but her throat is rough and tears it into a sob.

They are standing at the swell of a particularly steep hill: the road curves sharply right on its downward path, with only a half-hearted stone wall standing between the pavement and the black pit of valley beyond. Riza wonders now, as she often does when faced with such sudden shift in altitude, if the fall would be enough to kill her. A running jump, a swan dive down. If she can't see the ground, will she ever reach it?

How many towers in Ishval did she look out of, fighting the same intrusive thoughts? How many bricks, dropped from inches above her perch, did she watch descend, knowing the loose sand would muffle the impact and blunt her own chances?

“You're a wreck, Riza,” Jean says. “You have been since we lost him. It wasn't my decision to keep you out, but I agreed with it. It was all we could do to keep you alive, and we had no proof to give you. Nothing. Until that week I came to Central with the boys, I thought we were on revenge.”

“And now what? There's a chance it's a rescue?”

He is silent for a long while. A few meters behind, Breda's patience has worn thin, and they hear the engine's rumble die out. The cooling metal ticks, acting as the absent insect chorus. She is farther now from Jean and the truck than she was from Roy, only an hour or two ago.

“I don't know what we saw in that alley,” he says at last, stepping through each word with strong caution. “I don't know if it really was him, or just a clever parlor trick. But I mean to find out. We all do.”

East City, then the desert and the ruins of Xerxes, and then Xing, and somewhere far beyond it all is the rising sun. The first ray of light hits her face, and Riza snaps her eyes closed.

“I know this isn't enough of an answer. There's a lot more to explain, but I'm not the one to do it.”

She already knows who will have the answers—but she is hollowed out, empty of anything but anger.

“No,” she says roughly. “No, you're not.”

She doesn't follow him back—she goes first, shunning his offered hand and slamming the truck door in his face. He climbs into the front seat again, silent, facing forward.

Breda glances back through the mirror.

“We good?” he asks, fingers drumming on the wheel. “Everything settled?”

“Just drive,” Riza says shortly, holding her broken hand out to Knox and meeting no one's eyes.

Knox can do almost nothing for her—as the truck stutters on and forward, he paws through the meager aid kit provided, frowning.

“You need a surgeon,” he grunts out, winding gauze tight to serve as a temporary splint. “A real goddamn doctor. Not some underpaid chopper like me.”

“We've got people in Mebdo,” Breda calls back. “We'll figure it out, Doc.”

“You should get some sleep,” Rebecca says quietly, hand warm on Riza's knee. “Or try to, anyway.”

There's space enough to lie down, and a blanket, and even a coat bunched beneath her head to act as pillow. Knox and Rebecca sit on the bench bolted to the wall behind the driver's seat, not talking. Silence out of respect.

But Riza can't close her eyes. She watches Rebecca lean forward, pulling the towel from Jean's neck to check the skin beneath. Purple and red. A bouquet of brutal flowers.

For three hours, they keep the morning sun on their right and rumbles over rough back roads. Riza watches the ceiling, the lights dancing across flat white metal, pushing from her mind thoughts of anything but her own steady breathing.

Mebdo arrives around them—the doors are thrown open, and hands reach in. Squinting past the sun, Riza allows herself to be pulled up and lifted and passed along.

“We've got wounded!” Knox calls out, and a rough voice answers.

“Over here. Yoki, go find May.”

Riza reaches the end of the receiving line, and her vision darkens in the shadow of a massive man: tan skin and a thick white scar gouged between his red eyes.

“Scar?” she breathes, and he sneers.

“Amestrian.”


	7. Seven

**Seven**

The little girl that steps forward is pigtails and pink dress and stubby mittens swinging from a string around her neck. She breathes through her mouth and doesn't quite make contact with Riza's bare skin.

“I don't know,” the little girl says, and the tiny black-and-white creature peering over her shoulder gives a sympathetic keen. “The damage is really bad.”

“Concentrate on the soft tissues,” Knox says. “We can treat the fractures, but it's no use if compartment syndrome sets in.”

“Hmm,” the little girl replies, lifting Riza's hand with the gentle upward pressure of two fingers beneath her wrist. She hardly needs to bend down to examine Riza's palm. “I guess I could give it a try.”

“I'm sorry,” Riza interjects. “But _you're_ the doctor?”

“Oh, no,” the girls says brightly. “I'm May Chang. Mr. Marcoh is the doctor. I'm just an alkahestrist.”

Riza looks to Knox, who is busy sorting through unlabeled vials of some clear liquid.

“And is that some sort of alchemic medical sub-specialty?”

“Yes,” comes a gruff voice from the room's edge. “It's a Xingese discipline.”

Riza doesn't glance so much as slide her gaze around to the Ishvalan, hunched against the doorway.

“She's healed bullet wounds for me,” he says. “She can fix your hand.”

He steps back, and she tracks his retreat in silence.

“I'll give you something to knock you out for a while,” Knox says, barging into view. May Chang shuffles out of the way, fanning a stretch of white broadcloth over a low table. “Just relax, Lieutenant. We'll get you fixed up.”

She lies back as instructed and extends her left arm. Knox digs the needle beneath her skin as light floods the room. Lamps are hung around the bed, and she squints, shrinking against the pillow.

“What are you giving me?”

“Sedative,” Knox grunts. “We're short on straight painkillers at the moment, and you won't want to be awake for this.”

The injection burns up her arm, and Riza closes her eyes, unwilling to watch the room fade out.

She won't remember any of it when she wakes up, but it's still nice to dream.

Roy: his hands and face and heart, split in perfect halves. From the right side grows a new left, mismatched and grotesque and unwieldy. She reaches for him, but he doesn't reach back, twisting out, spiraling away into the abyss of her unconsciousness.

Eyes open wide, she watches the sun fade up from the west and track around to the east, again and again, the world in rapid motion around while Riza stands so still. Six days, a month, six months, a year—back and back and back further until she loses count and closes her eyes, feeling the sway of trucks and trains pulling along the narrow track of her life.

“Why do we always measure it? Everyone _knows_ that it happened.”

“Because,” he replies. “Because, because, because.”

Roy again, compact in battle dress uniform, holding up the opposite end of a body, wrapped and ready to join his brothers beneath the desert sand. And she doesn't even bother to ask if it's one of his men—she rolls her ankle climbing out of the hole and drops, ripping her boots off with a shriek, throwing them across the yard. With a tired look, he gathers them up and puts a hand beneath her arm and lifts, and she limps on his escort into an old stable standing empty beneath the setting sun.

She doesn't want to dream about this—she doesn't want to _remember_ it, but she can't control this. Not a participant—her lot only to remember and observe and suffer.

“See?” Roy says, pressing along the tendon for emphasis. “Just fine. You'll survive this war yet, Hawkeye.”

“Who says I want to?”

Kill record: fifty in one day. Allowed off the line early because she used up even the reserve ammo. Roy is watching her with wounded wide eyes.

“Look, if it's what Kimblee said—”

_Of course it's what he said_ , she wants to snarl. It's only ever the truth that really hurts, in her experience.

Small mercies: she leaves Roy behind at the perfectly worst moment, and opens her eyes on Hughes's quietly packed living room. Gracia has an arm around Riza's shoulders and Havoc is holding her hand and no one will let her go home.

Hughes has stepped into the kitchen to take a call, and they are all waiting. It's been four days, and someone will have to call Fuery with whatever news—his turn at the hospital, watching over the boys.

Riza already knows. She _knows_ , and doesn't want to hear it confirmed again, but Jean's grip is tight and Gracia's arm is heavy, and somewhere in the shadows past the hallway, Elicia is sleeping, oblivious.

“I understand,” Hughes is heard to say, though they all know he means the opposite. “Thank you, sir.”

They hear the click of the receiver hook, and Hughes's shuddering breath, and then he shuffles into the room, head bowed.

“They're declaring it,” he says, each word a heavy weight. “Officially.”

“I don't understand. It's a finite space,” Riza says, anchored to his couch. No one looks up. “How could you miss someone like him?”

This is not what she says. In the memory, her mouth opens and then closes, and she can't afford even the dignity of a sob. She doesn't cry, and everyone is staring at her in expectant silence.

But this is not the memory. This is a dream.

“Let me go,” Riza says. “I want to let go.”

But no one is listening.

When she finally does wake up, the sun is gone and so is Knox. Everyone, in fact—the room is dark and tenant-less. What she can see, from a bed shoved into one corner, bends and waves in response to her stillness: a window frame etched out by watery moonlight, a low table with pitcher and glass, her gauze-bound and splinted right hand.

She lifts her hand, to test for pain, but the room shifts down and then back up, and she has to close her eyes to stay anchored.

Standing will obviously take extra work, so she breaks the task into barely-manageable pieces—opening and closing her eyes until she's sure they _are_ open, shifting the thin blanket off limb by limb, sliding her feet to the bed's edge. They feel swollen, and she can see dimly that no one bothered to take off her boots.

Sitting up almost ends her. First attempt failed, she rolls onto her left and pushes up with her working hand. Nauseous, she holds herself still, face buried in the crook of her left arm, right dangling limp. She presses her feet against the floorboards.

“I would not suggest that.”

Not alone. She narrows his voice to a stretch of wall far opposite. His red eyes glint—she sees a flash of another pair superimposed and shudders.

“I killed hundreds of your countrymen, and you still feign pity?” she slurs. “I'm touched.”

“You're of no use broken.”

She slides to the edge and pushes up, swiping at the wall for balance.

“So we're friends now?”

He scoffs.

“Allies. And that's being generous.”

She hardly reaches his shoulders, but it's difficult to gauge—looking up takes all her effort. Slowly, she is sliding back down the wall.

“You still wish you'd been the one to kill him.”

Frowning, flashing red. The scar tissue between his eyes is pearly white. Inscrutable.

“It's okay,” she says. “I wish that too.”

He doesn't rise, and she drags herself through the door, careful to set her foot flat with each step.

She had expected a tent, but this is someone's home. She stumbles into the kitchen and through another door—into a yard of cracked earth and mute chickens. A thin wire fence runs along one side from the shed and then slumps, defeated, against the house corner.

The wire cuts the pad of her finger when she pushes it down, but she can't feel the blood welling up. It makes a red smear on the greying sleeve of her sweater.

Without the wall to hold her, Riza sways and shivers, squinting to make out a series of ramshackle houses, staggered in uneven rows. Every fourth or fifth window is lit by lamplight, and there is the confused hum of presence all around.

She uses fence posts to stay upright, fighting down the incessant waves of sickness. She can't remember the name of this slum, or how she got here, or what she's headed for. All she can concentrate is the stuttered rhythm of this step and next step and next and next.

Cold, and she doesn't feel it. Empty streets and empty head and empty stomach. Lurching from post to post, insides twisting. She revisits what little she can remember—red eyes, pale face, vacant smile. Explosion.

Voices rise up on her left, and Riza follows the magnetic noise. There's a tent, and a sturdy stack of crates she can slump against. A conversation, muddled in agitation.

“—mistake to put you on the detail, and I _said so_ from the very beginning.”

“What do you want from me?” Jean rasps. “I'm sorry, alright? But I would do the exact same thing over again.”

“Of _course_ you fucking would,” Breda snaps back. “You don't _think_. You do whatever you want, with no regard for the consequences.”

“What the hell is _that_ supposed to mean?”

“You know exactly what I mean. _Right_ after he died? Like all you were waiting for was when they put him in the ground. But never mind the right thing—Havoc's gotta be the hero!”

“You're stepping over a line,” Rebecca says, hushed in warning.

Is this still the dream? Riza sees the memory assemble itself before her, the pieces that pile up and arrange for clarity: the fresh graveside, as everyone else wandered away, and she stood there still, staring down. Jean had touched her arm.

“Come on,” he'd said. “We're all going to Hughes's place.”

“Not yet,” she'd replied. “I'm not ready yet.”

But, of course:

“Come on. That's enough, now. We need to go.”

Had she gone? Had she acquiesced to the pull? Had she stumbled at being turned, had she strained her neck to keep looking, to find the imprint of his missing bones beneath the earth?

Had she stood still. Had she stayed.

There's a scuffle of noise that tips Riza forward from the memory—tin cups clattering and the scrape of feet on frozen ground.

“That's enough!” Rebecca snaps. “Both of you! Hughes can sort it out when he gets here, but until then—lay off! We're not helping anything, picking at each other like this.”

Breda takes some parting shot, muffled, and Riza is almost certain she hears her own name. The tent wall explodes outward, expelling Breda and Jean. Rebecca follows, holding Jean back, as they watch Breda stomp off into the darkness.

“Deep breaths,” Rebecca says, rubbing Jean's arm.

“Easy for you to say,” he replies, coughing. Riza is just prescient enough to shift behind the crates, but they cross to the other side of the path. Jean slumps against the lamppost, and he pulls Rebecca just close enough to rest his forehead on her shoulder. “Tell me I did the right thing.”

Rebecca plants a little kiss on the crown of his head.

“I can't tell you that,” she says. “Even if I knew it. And anyway, what kind of woman would I be, if I just did everything you told me?”

“The _marrying_ kind,” Jean sighs, and she runs her hands through his hair, smiling. “Still up for it?”

“Thought we weren't talking about that until we were ready.”

“Now,” Jean says, and his voice is muffled by her skin. “How's now?”

“Are you being serious?”

He pulls back and looks up—eye contact's important with him. Something Riza had never gotten used to.

“This is it for me. Whatever happens—after this, I'm out.”

There is a red spot on Riza's knee—growing beneath her left hand, and she wipes at it a few times before remembering the broken skin of her left forefinger.

“Jean,” Rebecca says softly. “What the hell are you going to do if you're not a soldier?”

He's quiet for a long moment.

“Anything else,” he sighs, head falling forward. “ _Anything_ else.”

Rebecca's hand cradles his neck, and Riza leaves them behind—quiet as she guesses she has to be, she half-crawls back behind the tent. She should keep going, all the way back to where she first woke up, but then she sees a quiet white truck tucked into an alley between two barns, and she stops, hands limp on either side.

They'll look for her. They'll be expecting her to be right where they left her, and they'll be upset when she isn't there. Always upset, when she fails to follow the line, when she ducks the order or goes off script or just sits there, numb, trapped between arms and hands, until finally she finds enough voice to ask permission to go home.

The truck's door sits ajar, and Riza is careful to leave no trace of blood as she opens it and climbs inside and closes the door just cracked, to let the moonlight filter in. The frost will hide her footprints.

The blanket has been left, and someone's coat to serve as pillow, and as soon as Riza slides down to the floor, the frozen weight of sleep presses between her shoulder-blades. She lies on her stomach, face towards her left—too afraid now to closely examine what might remain of her throbbing right.

Even sedated, sleep is slow to arrive, but Riza does not worry. It will come for her, as it always does.

The hum of noise fades and rises and fades again—voices and the buzz of electric lights and the crunch of footsteps moving through the night. Moonlight reveals to her a thin coat of soot on the floor of the truck, right beneath her open hand. Debris from another life, she thinks, dragging her fingertip through the particles of ash.

Circle first, then another circle inside. Two triangles, one inverted, tangled together, with the third inside upright. Earth and air, cradling flame. She remembers the words, mouthing along with his academic chant, holding the blanket to her chest and following the dip of his pen across the paper.

“ _Cuantum_ ,” she whispers, and, “ _idissolubilis qualitas reverto_.”

She never learned the meaning—doesn't know Xerxian but for the whisper of his lips above her back. She learned only what they taught: her father by accident or eavesdrop, and Roy by excitement and inclusion.

Her blood-blackened fingertip is an imperfect brush, but the circle is complete. The air above it shimmers and feels somehow alive. Finger to hand to arm to shoulder to heart—Riza breathes in, and there is something new about it. A second sense—or sixth—of connection between her skin and the circle, between the quiet vibration of atoms in molecules. If she moves now, something will move with her, against, in response.

Her eyes close, and she dreams, and she forgets.

She wakes again when the sedation has worn off, when every muscle is stiff and her hand screams with searing pain. There is sunlight falling over her outstretched arm, and a fine sparkling sheen of fresh snow drifting in through the half-opened door.

“Hawkeye!”

Her head is still foggy, but she remembers—Mebdo and Scar and the truck from East City. Her absence has been noted, and the echoes carry on between the rows of thin shanty walls.

“Riza, where are you?”

She doesn't respond. She turns onto her back and stares at the truck ceiling, left hand resting over her heart, breathing in air so cold it burns. The transmutation circle on her left is broken, smeared by her movement and the dusting of snow swept inside by the wind.

Two pairs of footsteps cross in front of the door and stop, and her little sliver of light wavers.

“I hope she didn't go far. It's so cold.”

“She's fine. You'll see. Lieutenant can take care of herself.”

“Edward? Alphonse?”

Her voice comes out a sandpaper whisper, so she pulls herself up and pushes open the door.

“Lieutenant!” Alphonse says, reaching out a hand as Riza swings her feet over the bumper and stands, unsteady from the cold. “We've been looking for you. Are you alright?”

Edward is watching her, guarded, braced for recrimination. That cut above his eye has opened again, and he looks over-tired. She doesn't care if he's too old for it—if she's stepping over some invisible line. She pulls him against her chest, one-armed, hugging tight.

“I'm fine,” Riza says. “I'll be alright now.”


	8. Eight

**Eight**

The day Hughes finally shows up in Mebdo, a fight breaks out. Turns out the Xingese aren't all together—there's two factions, apparently, and neither one likes the other very much. Not that they seem particularly fond of the Amestrians either.

“That's Ling,” Edward says, pointing with his fork. “The old man is Fu, and the girl is Lan Fan. They’re his servants or something, and they're sort of—sort of stalking us.”

“We picked them up in Rush Valley a few weeks ago,” Alphonse adds from the bottom of the ladder. The barracks roof isn't wide enough for him to fit, but Riza leans over her knees, nodding down at him.

“I thought you boys've been in the north since October.”

“Yeah, we weren't,” Edward sighs. “Sorry.”

Riza shrugs away the apology, holding out a bottle for him to open. He twists off the cap and passes it back, eyeing the sling that keeps her right hand immobile across her chest.

“Doesn't it hurt still?”

“Not worth the fog,” Riza replies, squinting at the fight. “What about the other? The little girl?”

“That's all the colonel,” Edward says, following her gaze. Most of the Amestrian contingent is hanging back from the main event, but Breda's got a hand on the gun strapped to his hip, ready to calm any escalation. The Ishvalans who inhabit Mebdo keep their heads down and eyes averted, shuffling along their daily routine. The ones who need the well side-step the patch of iced mud where Ling and Scar stand, inches apart.

“Her name is May Chang,” Alphonse says, and Edward rolls his eyes.

“Her name is May Chang,” he repeats, sing-song mocking. He ducks Riza's sidelong glance sheepishly. “Package deal with Scar. No idea how or why, but the colonel got him. Doctor Marcoh and that asshole Yoki, too.”

“Quite the traveling band,” Riza says. There's raised voices now, to match the glares, and Breda's just stepping forward when a truck pulls in and Hughes jumps out.

Edward holds out a bag of jerky, and Riza takes a piece.

“So what's their problem with each other?” she asks between bites, as Hughes puts himself between the factions. He looks angry, but they can’t quite hear what he’s saying.

“Ling and May are both the children of the Emperor of Xing,” Alphonse says. “They're here looking for a philosopher's stone to give to their father and secure their clans' future. Whoever gets the stone first becomes the heir.”

“Why's he want a stone?”

“To be immortal.”

“What's the point of being heir to someone who's immortal?”

“Don't interfere with the affairs of their country,” the Elrics intone flatly, and Riza has to laugh.

The crowd starts to break up, slowly. May Chang tugs at Scar’s arm, and Ling’s servants shuffle him aside. Hughes sweeps a glance around the settlement—it’s hard to read his expression from this distance, but Riza stands, to be sure he’ll see her.

“You’re not gonna kill him, are you?” Alphonse asks quietly.

“Of course not,” Riza says. “We’re just going to talk.”

She's had plenty of practice climbing down ladders one-handed, but the boys like to help. Edward holds her upper arm while Alphonse waits below, ready to catch if she slips. They walk on either side of her, a mismatched pair of bodyguards. Ed carries the discards of their lunch.

Hughes disappears by the time they reach the well—the crowd has re-shuffled, and Riza sees Jean just as he sees her, reaching out in hesitation.

“Come on,” Riza says, turning left. “Let's take the walking tour.”

The Ishvalans give them a wide berth on every side, understandably—even for Amestrians, they stand out. Alphonse gives a cheery hello to everyone, and Edward grunts, and Riza tries to smile but pain flares through her arm and hand and everything comes out as a grimace.

They leave behind the barracks, a collection of empty barns the Amestrians have taken for themselves. The Ishvalans here have no need of them—no cattle to house, no crops to gather in and shield from the elements. The slum must have started as a farming commune, with shacks growing in haphazard rows from the courtyard out, as more and more Ishvalans fled the extermination of their people.

Perhaps they felt safe here, or deluded themselves into a certainty of isolation. But there's apparently no escaping Amestrian invasion, even now.

“So where’s the rest of the conspiracy?” Riza asks, as they round the last row of shacks. The slum is bordered on two sides by a wide creek and on the third by a stand of lifeless trees. The fourth side slopes to join the road—they stand at the top of the muddy decline and stare out.

“Dunno,” Edward mutters. “We might be it.”

“Was that the plan?”

“Not exactly.”

Edward kicks a loose rock into a waiting rut—it rolls only inches before giving up.

“One of them can—he can look like anyone. Sound like them. We had to be sure that what we saw was—was what we _saw_.”

“Where?” Riza asks. “When?”

“About a month ago, in Central. It wasn't us though—Scar saw him.”

“Can't wait for _that_ explanation,” Riza mutters. “So what was the plan?”

“Draw them out. See if he really was one of them. They want to keep us alive, for some reason—me and Al, so we staged a fight with Scar. Timing was off, though.”

“Who’s _they_?”

But Edward doesn’t answer—he's staring back at the slum and points. Sunset already, and Breda’s approaching with a frown, extra coat slung over his shoulder.

“What’d I tell you about breaking perimeter?” he says, addressing the boys. “Get back down—it's chow time. Here, Riza.”

He holds the coat out for her, and she takes it after a moment, half-glaring.

“He's not hiding from you,” Breda sighs. “Just getting the report. There'll be a briefing.”

“So I'm invited this time?” she asks bitterly. Alphonse helps slip the coat over her shoulders.

“Guest of goddamn honor,” Breda confirms.

He walks them back down to the barracks, all the while huffing out updates between stomps.

“Pendleton's gonna be a goddamn bloodbath,” he says. “Just like the brass wants. Drachma's pushing in at every angle, and Fuery said the south looks no better, but they’re holding everything back. Artillery, vehicle support—makes no goddamn sense to me. Way I see it, if we're gonna fight, we should goddamn _fight_.”

“Throw more lives away on someone else's cause?” Riza snaps. “Because that's proven so well in the past.”

“Look, Riza, I know you’re mad, but don't try take it out on me—”

“Because it wasn't your call?”

She spins back to face him at the barn's doorway, feeling the anger tighten around her eyes.

“Something you'll learn when you have your own war, Breda—the moment you choose to obey an order, the _call_ becomes yours and yours alone. You can't run from that.”

But he is not so easily shamed—he grabs a bowl and bread for her and sits on Edward's other side. May Chang and Marcoh eat separate, at the far end of the table, while Knox chain-smokes near a cracked window. Ling Yao and his faction are missing—or lurking somewhere in the shadows. Rebecca sits across from Alphonse, bringing Jean and his stony silence. She and Breda and the boys carry a conversation while Riza eats, clumsily, navigating the spoon with her unsteady left.

Jean looks just as bad as Riza feels—wincing at each swallow, picking at everything except the soup. His neck is still swollen with black-and-yellow bruises, and he looks like he hasn't been sleeping.

_Good_ , Riza thinks a little viciously. _I shouldn't be the only one._

Hughes doesn't show—they have to go to him, to the house they've been using as a clinic, where he's deep in conversation with Scar. They stop talking immediately and stand apart, waiting for the others to file in. Ling's team slips in last, maintaining an icy silence.

“Grab a seat,” Hughes says, gesturing to the chairs gathered loosely around a long, low table. Riza takes the end of the table and stares him down. He doesn’t meet her eyes.

She gathers little from the briefing: they speak in code, to her ears. Envy and Lust and Gluttony and Xerxes and philosopher stones and—and she stops paying attention halfway through, drops her gaze, rests her throbbing hand on the tabletop and thinks of nothing. The watch, forgotten until now in her coat pocket, ticks in rhythm against the cadence of conversation. Ling speaks, and Breda interrupts, Alphonse offers and Edward mutters, Hughes answers and deflects and booms with orders.

She pulls the pocket-watch out and sets in on the table. Edward’s glance flickers over, and so does Jean’s, but they both quickly snap back to Hughes.

The tabletop is filthy with dust and ash—everyone else keeps their hands in their laps, with only the lamp to occupy the vast surface. Riza lifts her left hand and, without really considering what she’s doing, begins to trace transmutation circles around the watch.

Hughes carries the entire conspiracy on his shoulders. The highest-ranking officer here—and the sharpest mind, by far. There was a reason he’d been Roy’s designated tactician during the war, and he has a way of spinning even the harshest defeat into a sliver of advancement.

“The timing's not perfect,” Hughes sighs, “but it's fair to speculate that it wasn't Envy masquerading, like we thought. This is something else.”

“A new target for the list?” Fu asks.

“That's for the lieutenants to report.”

Attention shifts—one by one each pair of eyes settles on her and Jean, except for Hughes. Riza wills him to look up, to meet her eyes, but he stares only at his own hands.

She lets Jean talk until his voice gives out, hiding her clenched fist in her lap. The lamplight dances around the watch's surface, a compliment to Jean's halting speech. He's just describing how Roy crushed her hand, and she stretches the fingers wrapped tight with gauze, savoring the burn.

“He said he—”

Jean falters, coughing. He's set his hands on the tabletop, clenched to fists, inches from the pocket-watch.

“He was going to kill us,” Riza finishes, addressing the broken skin over Jean's knuckles. “He said he was tired of sharing, and that he was there to kill me. But then something changed. He was arguing with himself—like two people in the same body. Then he killed the creatures holding us and collapsed. He called himself a homunculus—”

Jean's knuckles blanch under pressure.

“—but he didn't identify _which one_.”

“He claimed to be one of those unholy creatures?” Scar interjects, disgusted.

“He was both,” Riza says, and beneath the table, Edward slips his hand into hers. “He was Roy, and he was something else.”

“Are you sure?” Hughes asks, and suddenly he can meet her eyes. She stares him down, anger festering.

“Yes,” she says. She feels sick—can smell sulfur, feel the ash dusting her skin, the fresh throbbing pain of her crushed hand. The tendrils of steam rising from his lips, the wild look of emptiness in his eye.

“He tried to warn us. Said _everyone_ is involved, all the way up to Bradley. That they're trying to get to Armstrong, and they didn't suspect resistance. That he would go back to Central and report to someone he referred to as _Father_.”

“ _Father_? What does that mean?”

“I wouldn't know that,” she says, very quietly. Such open hatred would more than qualify as insubordination—she feels all of it and lets it pour out her eyes at him. She wants to see him flinch. _Waits_ for it.

“So it couldn't have been Envy,” Alphonse cuts in nervously. “Because we were fighting him in Central.”

“ _We_ were fighting him,” Lan Fan says sharply. “Along with that other— _grotesque_ monstrosity.”

“Called himself Gluttony,” Ling adds with a shudder. “I can see why.”

“Means we're up to five,” Breda says. “Lust, Envy, Gluttony, Bradley—and whatever the colonel is.”

“Well, if we're sticking to the pattern, that leaves Wrath, Greed, Sloth, and Pride.”

“ _Father_ ,” Hughes repeats, frowning, and he turns easily out of Riza's glare. “In Central. Did he say anything else?”

“No,” Riza says. “Nothing you obviously don’t already know.”

She shakes off Edward’s hand.

“ _Don’t thank me just yet_ ,” she near-snarls. “Because you knew _this_ was still to come, right?”

Now he flinches—but that’s not enough anymore. She stands, and the rest of the table shrinks away.

“He was there to kill me. I was his target, and you _knew_ that, because you had Havoc and Breda and Rebecca on guard detail. You sent me to East City to get me out of the way of whatever the hell you were doing in Central—so Grumman’s involved, too. Is there _anyone_ who’s been telling me the truth in the last six months?”

Both hands on the tabletop now, fury stiffening her shoulders. The fingers of her left hand brush the edge of one of her traced circles—she feels briefly the spark of transmutation, and the lamp explodes in a bouquet of flame and glass shards. Riza just manages to shield her face from debris with her right hand as fire engulfs the pocket-watch.

“What the hell—?”

They're all looking to her, but she has nothing.

“Too much kerosene,” Jean says quickly, and when Riza lowers her hand, he’s staring into her eyes. He looks afraid.

The meeting ends after that—shaken, everyone scatters save for a few: the Elrics won’t leave her, and Jean hovers, while Marcoh changes the dirtied bandages around Riza's hand.

“Fuck,” Jean whispers, as the skin is exposed. Riza feels briefly nauseous and looks away.

“This would be nothing,” Marcoh laments, gently prodding her blackened fingers, “if I only had the stone.”

“No use crying over it,” Riza says, more brusque than she feels.

“Hey, Hawk,” Jean begins. “That lamp—”

But Hughes comes back, just opening the door and standing there, protected by silhouette.

“Is everything alright?” he asks.

The Elrics wait for Riza to move—she’s slower now, weighed down by the growing throb in her exposed hand. Marcoh snips the last stretch of gauze away.

“Give us the room,” Riza says. “Colonel knows field dressing well enough.”

Marcoh bows out easily, and then the Elrics follow with reluctance. Jean exits last, frowning, brow knitted.

“Look, Riza,” Hughes says, when they’re alone.

“No,” she says firmly. “I’m tired of living in the dark. You _owe_ me answers.”

Hughes sighs and pulls off his glasses, rubbing hard at the bridge of his nose.

“Where do you want me to start?”

“Where do you _think_?” she snaps.

With fresh water from the basin, Hughes scrubs his hands, working dirt from beneath each fingernail.

“I was one of the officers to first debrief Ed in the hospital. I thought I was going to be the only one, but another officer showed up. Henry Douglas. A colonel, said from the office of the provost marshal, but I’d never seen him before in my life.”

He studies each separate supply before laying it out, in the exact order he’ll use them, beside a bowl of clear water. Two rolls of wrapping, a stack of gauze squares, a bottle of sulfa powder, scissors, and a rag. She holds her right hand flat, and his fingers circle her wrist gently.

“He did most of the talking, and it was quickly clear to me that he was trying to steer Ed's account. He already had a script for what happened, and he wasn't interested in deviation. The official report is a heavily-censored version of what Ed actually told us, and there were some things Ed left out deliberately, which he told me about later.”

“How much later?”

“I was already suspicious that first night, but there was nothing I could do. They were still searching, still compiling their next steps. So I waited, until after the funeral, before I approached Ed.”

“Who else was involved from the beginning?”

He dips the rag into the water and wrings it out, then dips again and wrings again.

“Just the boys,” he says. “I had to know what they knew before moving forward, but I knew I was working against the clock. They were going to dissolve the squad and reassign all of you as soon as possible. It was all I could do to keep you with me without having you declared unfit.”

She flinches—mostly from the sting of the rag and water on her broken skin, but a little from the implication of incompetency. Humiliating, but understandable. Those first few weeks after Roy’s death were nothing but a dull blur in most places.

“What Ed didn’t tell him, is what he heard Bradley say. Before the explosion, when he first showed up the laboratory, he put on a show of being there to help, but—Bradley was allied with the homunculi. He went down there to help _them_.”

“I’ve kind of figured that out,” Riza says, trying to keep the pain from her voice. “I want to know how we got _here_.”

Her palm, each finger, her knuckles, the tangled mess of skin stretched over the back of her hand—he works loose dried blood and rearranges the fragments of skin. She can't tell if it's healed at all—if May Chang's efforts were any use, or if it was all an exercise in delaying the inevitable.

“I couldn’t go forward with that. Bradley still being mourned as a national hero, and Gardner in without changing a damn thing. All I had were suspicions, Riza.”

“Enough for an alliance.”

“That came later. In pieces. It’s not as much of a conspiracy as you think.”

He sets a fresh square of gauze in the center of her palm and holds it there until she looks up.

“I’m sorry it happened like this,” he says. “But I won’t apologize for the past. I did what I thought was best. For you, for the boys. For Roy.”

He sighs again.

“You’re not the only one who lost him, you know.”

She holds his stare.

“No,” she says steadily. “But I’m the only one who got left behind.”

She needs to find the Elrics, and Hughes still has fires to extinguish—they say good night at the door and turn away from each other, hunched against the wind. She listens to the crunch of his retreat before turning herself towards the barracks—she and the boys have marked out a corner for themselves, and they will be waiting for her.

Robbed of catharsis, she twists in the wind. She wanted to scream, to shout, to tear Hughes apart for the betrayal, but he's never been a man easily ruined by emotion. Logical, detached, forthright—she wants to press her thumbs into his eyes and watch him bleed the way she has.

“No wonder he kept me out,” she mutters, shrugging her coat close and starting out.

Jean is waiting for her outside, beneath the single spotlight, breathing into his cupped hands.

“You forgot this.”

And he sets the pocket-watch in her left hand and closes her fingers over it.

“Riza—”

“Not tonight,” she sighs. “Okay? Please. I just want to sleep.”

“Yeah,” he says. “I wish I could, too.”

They share silence, but she hasn't the energy to examine whether she's still as angry with him as she had wanted to be.

“I know it's not worth much of anything, but I am sorry I hurt you.”

They both look down at the watch.

“Transmutation, huh?” he says, and she steps back from him.

“I don't know. It just—it just happened.”

“Guess you pick some things up. You were with him forever.”

“I didn't even know what I was doing.”

“Hell of a talent to have, though,” he says, and he grimaces a half-smile, just for her. “Since you can't aim for shit with your left.”

He kisses her—on the temple, off-center and brief, before pushing open the barracks door and disappearing inside.

Alone, Riza looks down at the watch. The front is dull, the clock-face inside dusty, and the back-plate—

She steps deeper into the light with a sudden spike of illness, but it's there, no question: a hairline crack around the edge. Just enough space to wedge in a fingernail.

She pries and pulls until it bleeds—until the plate pops free, and she reaches in with two shaking fingers.

A piece of parchment, folded into eighths, and a fragment of a photo: her own smiling face, ten years old, holding a buttercup blossom beneath her chin.


	9. Nine

**Nine**

Edward and Alphonse are waiting up for her, heads bent together over the bedrolls. She stops short on seeing them, pocket-watch curled in her fist, and for a moment she considers not telling them—keeping it all inside, selfishly, a secret to hold alone. But then the lantern-light flickers and she catches a glimpse of the wells beneath Edward's eyes and the slump of Alphonse's broad shoulders, and she tosses the watch onto the bare blanket between them.

The back-plate springs free and rolls away, disgorging the watch's contents.

“It was a message,” she says with a heavy sigh. “He covered the seam with something thin enough to melt, and that's what I found inside. That's why he told you to give it to me.”

She sits heavily between them, scrubbing her face with her left hand before working her right loose of the sling. Ed takes the photograph between two fingers and gingerly unfolds the accompanying parchment. He reads the little folded fragment of paper that, unfolded, reveals line after line of Roy's cramped handwriting.

_September second—saw Tabitha today. She prefers the river-walk, and always wears a spray of daisies in her collar. She introduced me to Henrietta and Emily, rooming together for the winter. They asked me to tea, and I declined. Tomorrow is Rosalie, and after her, Ernestine. Dance card's full. I passed a bakery and thought of Svenja. Abigail was working, but I didn't stop in. Francesca was somewhere around—no need to cause a scene. Irene's birthday is next week: penny candy and daffodils. Rebekah is going to bring her sister, Sarah, by the office sometime soon._

Flirtatious gibberish—and it goes on for the entire length of the page. Women she's never heard of and a thousand little anecdotes that don't quite connect. To a casual viewer, it is a list of conquests, a recorded series of empty and meaningless nights that never existed.

“You sure it's a message?” Edward says delicately. “Looks like just...keepsakes.”

“First letter of each name,” she sighs, dropping onto the roll and closing her eyes. His favored cipher—notes disguised as journal entries, meeting minutes. It takes the boys less than ten minutes to solve it for her.

“Theresa first brought me buttercups in nineteen-aught-nine.”

Her tired eyes snap open, and she fixes Edward with a questioning frown.

“What did you say?”

She checks their decryption herself, entirely awake now, but it's correct:

_Theresa first brought me buttercups in nineteen-aught-nine.”_

“But that's not right,” she says. “It was 1898.”

“What?”

“Look at the photograph.”

She pulls their notes closer to herself, brow creased, while Edward flips the photograph around.

“ _Riza, Wellesley, 1899_ ,” he reads. “I don't—”

“We first met in 1898,” she explains, eyes skating over the page again and again. “I was nine—we met the train in Wellesley, and I brought him buttercups from the garden. _This_ —”

She shakes the page.

“—is wrong. By 1909 we were in Ishval.”

“But who's _Theresa_?”

“My name is a derivative of Theresa,” she says quietly. “It means _reaper_.”

She takes up the pen in her left, murmuring more to herself than them.

“Why does it say 1909?”

As they watch, she writes out two shaky lines:

_U-i-f-s-f-t-b-g-j-s-t-u-c-s-p-v-h-i-u-n-f-c-v-u-u-f-s-d-v-q-r-j-o-o-j-o-f-u-f-f-o-b-v-h-i-u-o-j-o-f._

_S-g-d-q-d-r-z-e-h-q-r-s-a-q-n-t-f-g-s-l-d-a-t-s-s-d-q-b-t-o-r-h-m-m-h-m-d-s-d-d-m-z-t-f-g-s-m-h-m-d._

“What does that look like to you?”

“Elements,” Alphonse says, after a lengthy silence. “The first one: uranium, iodine, fluorine, sulfur. A couple don't fit, but the second line's nothing.”

So she writes the line out again, grouping the letters into elements, bracketing the nulls, discarding, rearranging. They are left with a list of repeats which Riza copies out, for a final time, at the bottom of the page.

Her glance skitters across the mess of notes and lines and cross-outs above, and the curve of her knuckles glints so hauntingly familiar. A shiver knocks the pen from her grip.

“That's enough,” she says. “That's enough for tonight.”

The riddle distracts the boys sufficiently from questioning her transmutation—and she pushes the incident from her mind as well. _Always_ her father insisted she had no natural talent at it—her requests to learn even a modicum of what he freely gave his apprentice were always rebuffed without a second thought.

What she knows now is only the product of rote memory: idle observation spanning years, a study only of boredom. She recognizes the symbols easily enough—fire cradled by air and earth—but their deeper meaning eludes her. The mechanism as well is a mystery. It's not enough to have the array: something within the alchemist is necessary for activation.

Father always told her she had no _feel_ for it, after all.

She can't remember the catalyst of her display—too focused on tearing into Hughes to even really begin to be conscious of what she'd been tracing into the dust. What in her mindless doodle had created the lantern's explosion? Anger? Confusion?

She is thankful for the lack of questions from all other witnesses, but still she cannot seem to find a moment to herself in the days that follow the discovery of the pocket-watch's secrets—a moment to reflect, to consider, to examine the mysteries of the picture and the note. She had wanted _in_ , after all, and now there is no escape.

Everyone is waiting to debrief her—the laboratory and the philosopher’s stone and the homunculi and the countrywide transmutation circle—and when she can distract herself from her thoughts, Riza is mostly listening, still shadowed close by Edward and Alphonse. Jean seems unwilling to test their new boundaries, and Hughes seems set on making up for past exclusion by over-inclusion. She still doesn’t really know what to make of Scar.

Ground was lost, ground was gained—everyone acts very busy, but no one seems to know what exactly they are doing anymore. Riza learns quick when to nod and when to keep still.

The pocket-watch is a weight now, stabbing between her ribs when least expected, carving its own little hollow into her chest. The message consumes her thoughts—stuffed between the pages of a small notebook that accompanies her everywhere.

The riddle of his final words. She is desperate to solve it—while the others are discussing a move north to pursue some lead of Scar's, Riza is tracing and re-tracing the elements and their atomic numbers, arranging in her mind every possible combination. _Truth within the truth_ , as she had once heard Edward say, so long ago.

Elements, atomic numbers—this is only the second layer.

For a week she carries it, too proud to ask for any more of the boys' help, too distracted by the impending move to properly examine her own thoughts. Mebdo is closing to them—the conspiracy has overstayed its welcome and must clear out before discovery endangers them all. At Jean’s suggestion they will be northbound, seeking an abandoned old mining town called Baschool. Scar will go a bit further to retrieve a book or journal or something—while the rest of them carry on doing exactly what this conspiracy seems best at: waiting.

“We still don’t know what they’re planning to use the portal for or when—or why they need _sacrifices_ alive.”

At the far end of the table, Hughes is pouring over a map with Edward and Alphonse and Breda. They have marked out every significant conflict with dates and casualty counts—the country is a sea of angry red waves.

Riza stays on her end, half-turned from them, scribbling and scrawling.

“Seems to me if we want answers to those questions,” Rebecca says, “we should be asking the ones that know.”

“If you can catch them,” Riza mutters, tracing the letters of _Theresa_ over and over again. She raises her voice a little, so they'll know it's directed at them. “Could've done so already—if you'd had a net in place when you were using me as bait.”

“Are you suggesting something?”

She drops her pen and meets Hughes's guarded gaze.

“It went after _me_ , specifically,” she says, “to quiet him. The fact that it failed—that attacking me was enough to make him break free, even for a little while—that can't go unnoticed.”

“Lieutenant's right,” Edward says, a little too quickly. “And if we get the colonel—we could try to figure out how we can get that thing out of him.”

The adults look away from him—save for Riza, who drums her fingers on the tabletop.

“If they think you're alive still,” Hughes concedes quietly.

“And why wouldn't they?”

He meets her eyes briefly, sighs, looks away— _stalls_.

“You've been reported missing,” Hughes finally says, with a heavy. “In two days, a body's going to be found a few miles downriver of East City. Grumman will identify it as you.”

She huffs out a breath, incredulous.

“Suicide? Have an old man pretend his only living family... _isn't_ anymore?”

“Groundwork was there,” Hughes says, and she's gratified that he looks at least a little ashamed. “Most of your personal effects left at home—your wallet, your dog. A few people have already reported seeing you that night, walking alone and looking...distressed. And you were—”

He clears his throat and looks away again.

“—you were already on watch, pending release from duty.”

Not gratified enough to eliminate anger completely, of course. Riza's pen hits the tabletop with sharp, rapid little taps.

“Whose body is it?” she snaps.

“A convincing fake.”

Another moment or two of tense silence before she relents.

“Well, there's nothing for it now. Guess we just hope it's not _that_ convincing.”

“I don't think they'll give up that easy,” Breda interjects gently. “I think they'll take the bait.”

“If we set it up right,” Rebecca says. “If we're ready. If they don't send more than one. _Maybe_.”

Riza drops her gaze back to the scrawled mess of her notes.

“What we need is firepower,” she says quietly.

“I'll think about it,” Hughes says, and suddenly he has closed enough distance to tap the page, interrupting her scrawl. “What's so important about September second?”

The atomic number for uranium, written out large and centered on the page, as though size will engender further discoveries. She flips the page closed.

“Nothing,” she says sharply. “Just scribbles.”

The significance hits her hour later—as she stands beneath a tepid shower stream, scrubbing clumsily at her scalp. Her first proper shower in nearly a week: they all have to share the one working stall in their makeshift medical building. Rebecca waits on the other side of the curtain, humming.

_Ninety-two. Nine and two. September second._

“Saw Tabitha today,” she whispers, pressing her fingers into the seam between broken tiles until her knuckles blanch. It's not her voice she hears—it's _his_ , his voice and his lips forming the words, the simple clear perfection of his lopsided smile.

The pocket-watch is back beneath her pillow, hidden away, and she must wait through getting dressed, through Rebecca brushing and braiding her hair, through Marcoh carefully fixing the binding around her now numb hand. No haste in the shivering walk back to the barrack—Ed's gloved hand holding on to her elbow, guiding her through the snow drifts.

She can't hope to explain the logic of this assumption nor the absolute _certainty_ of it—so she doesn't bother. She says good night and crawls into her bedroll and pulls the watch from its hiding place. The back-plate pops off easily in her hand, and she extracts the folded parchment with two trembling fingers. One long edge is ragged—a page torn from a book. She holds the watch to her chest and tries to keep her breathing even.

The next morning is more waiting—partially from a desire for discretion and partially from fear of confirmation. After breakfast, she paces the beaten-dirt floor of their common hall, waiting to catch Breda alone.

“What's up, Riza?” he asks, as she motions him into a quiet corner.

“Can you still get a message to Central? I need to send a telegram. To a Madame Christmas—she runs a bar down by the markets near the river.”

He blinks.

“Uh, sure. What d'you need it to say?”

She stares down at the hand strapped immobile to her chest, focusing on the slight tingle of burn.

“ _Did he ever keep a journal?_ ”


End file.
